[SystemSafety] John Nash has died

Mon May 25 08:45:49 CEST 2015

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.... in a traffic accident. Very sad.

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/24/john-nash-mathematician-beautiful-mind-dies-taxi-crash

Nash was one of the major developers of game theory after John von Neumann (who wrote about it
first with Oskar Morgenstern in The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944 (second edition
1947). Wikipedia suggests this approach was introduced in a paper of von Neumann from 1928.

von Neumann and Morgenstern didn't win the Nobel Memorial Prize. It took fifty years until John
Harsanyi, John Nash and Reinhard Selten won it in 1994 for their work in game theory.

John Harsanyi, also Hungarian, worked at Berkeley and was in fact a member of the Logic Group in
which I did my PhD, but I never met him. He died in 2000 aged 80.

Reinhard Selten taught at Bielefeld and I believe is still on the board of the ZiF
research/conference center.

Game theory has application to safety-critical systems, although not yet very much. It is
fundamental to decision theory. Both allow us to analyse how operators in safety-critical systems
are choosing to act and what the consequences are, and I have done so fruitfully in some cases.

The games considered by Nash & co were mostly competitive games (so-called zero-sum, in which when
one party wins another loses). There are also cooperative games, studied in his PhD thesis by
David Lewis (Convention, Harvard U.P., 1969). Thomas Schelling applied game theory most notably to
political and social questions (The Strategy of Conflict, Harvard U.P. 1960/1980).

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de