{"id":28270,"date":"2019-07-03T14:24:35","date_gmt":"2019-07-03T06:24:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/people.utm.my\/nurazaliah\/?p=28270"},"modified":"2019-07-04T14:25:41","modified_gmt":"2019-07-04T06:25:41","slug":"read-john-nashs-super-short-phd-thesis-with-26-pages-2-citations-the-beauty-of-inventing-a-field","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/nurazaliah\/2019\/07\/03\/read-john-nashs-super-short-phd-thesis-with-26-pages-2-citations-the-beauty-of-inventing-a-field\/","title":{"rendered":"Read John Nash\u2019s Super Short PhD Thesis with 26 Pages &amp; 2 Citations: The Beauty of Inventing a Field"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last week\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.econlib.org\/library\/Enc\/bios\/Nash.html\">John Nash<\/a>,\u00a0the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, and subject of the blockbuster film\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0268978\/\">A Beautiful Mind<\/a><\/em>,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2015\/05\/25\/science\/john-nash-a-beautiful-mind-subject-and-nobel-winner-dies-at-86.html\">passed away<\/a>\u00a0at the age of 86. He died in a taxi cab accident in New Jersey.<\/p>\n<p>Days later,\u00a0Cliff Pickover\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/pickover\/status\/602987442224779265\">highlighted<\/a>\u00a0a curious factoid: When Nash wrote his Ph.D. thesis in 1950,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20150608125658\/http:\/\/www.princeton.edu\/mudd\/news\/faq\/topics\/Non-Cooperative_Games_Nash.pdf\">&#8220;Non Cooperative Games&#8221;<\/a>\u00a0at Princeton University, the dissertation (you can\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20150608125658\/http:\/\/www.princeton.edu\/mudd\/news\/faq\/topics\/Non-Cooperative_Games_Nash.pdf\">read it online<\/a>\u00a0here) was brief. It ran only 26 pages. And more particularly, it was light on citations. Nash&#8217;s diss cited\u00a0two texts: One was written by\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/cs.stanford.edu\/people\/eroberts\/courses\/soco\/projects\/1998-99\/game-theory\/neumann.html\">John\u00a0von Neumann<\/a>\u00a0&amp;\u00a0Oskar Morgenstern, whose book,\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/press.princeton.edu\/chapters\/i7802.pdf\">Theory of Games and Economic Behavior<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>(1944), essentially created game theory and revolutionized the field of economics; the other cited text,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/linguistics\/events\/iap07\/Nash-Eqm.pdf\">&#8220;Equilibrium Points in n-Person Games,&#8221;<\/a>\u00a0was an article written by Nash himself. And it laid the foundation for his dissertation, another seminal work in the development of game theory, for which\u00a0Nash\u00a0won the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nobelprize.org\/nobel_prizes\/economic-sciences\/laureates\/1994\/\">Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The reward of inventing a new field, I guess, is having a slim bibliography.<\/p>\n<p>from <a href=\"http:\/\/www.openculture.com\/2015\/06\/read-john-nashs-super-short-phd-thesis.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">http:\/\/www.openculture.com\/2015\/06\/read-john-nashs-super-short-phd-thesis.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week\u00a0John Nash,\u00a0the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician, and subject of the blockbuster film\u00a0A Beautiful Mind,\u00a0passed away\u00a0at the age of 86. He died in a taxi cab accident in New Jersey. Days later,\u00a0Cliff Pickover\u00a0highlighted\u00a0a curious factoid: When Nash wrote his Ph.D. thesis in 1950,\u00a0&#8220;Non Cooperative Games&#8221;\u00a0at Princeton University, the dissertation (you can\u00a0read it online\u00a0here) was brief. It [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6541,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-howto"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/nurazaliah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/nurazaliah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/nurazaliah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/nurazaliah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6541"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/nurazaliah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28270"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/nurazaliah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28270\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28271,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/nurazaliah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28270\/revisions\/28271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/nurazaliah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/nurazaliah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/people.utm.my\/nurazaliah\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}