Special 24 June 2015

John Nash

John Nash, who died in a car crash in May 2015, was a mathematician famed for both his work and his troubled life. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work on game theory that has had wide influence in evolutionary biology, and the Abel Prize for his work on algebraic geometry and partial differential equations that brought him recognition from mathematicians. Here, we bring you research and comment related to Nash’s life and work from the archives of Nature Publishing Group.

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John Forbes Nash (1928–2015)

Master of games and equations.
- Martin A. Nowak
Obituary24 Jun 2015 Nature
'Beautiful mind' John Nash adds Abel Prize to his Nobel

Mathematician made famous by Hollywood will share US$765,000 award with Louis Nirenberg for work in the field of geometric analysis.
- Philip Ball
News25 Mar 2015 Nature
Deviating from the line
- Karl Sigmund
Book Review8 Jul 1999 Nature
Agreeing on strategies

A Nash equilibrium is a highly desirable situation in game theory, which earned its discoverer a Nobel prize. Such a fundamental result might seem hard to improve on, but new work has multiplied the situations in which Nash equilibria can apply.
- Ivar Ekeland
News & Views12 Aug 1999 Nature
Reputation can enhance or suppress cooperation through positive feedback

When individuals differ in their cooperative behaviour, it pays to take a partner’s reputation into account when deciding one's own levels of cooperation. Here the authors use game theory to analyse how this feeds back to change levels of cooperation as individuals change their reputation so as to change the behaviour of future partners.
- John M. McNamara
- Polly Doodson
Article20 Jan 2015 Nature Communications
The coevolution of choosiness and cooperation

It is shown that if individuals vary in their degree of cooperativeness, and if they can decide whether or not to continue interacting with each other on the basis of their respective levels of cooperativeness, then cooperation can gradually evolve from an uncooperative state. These results highlight the importance of individual behavioural differences in fostering the evolution of cooperation.
- John M. McNamara
- Zoltan Barta
- Alasdair I. Houston
Letter10 Jan 2008 Nature
The equilibria that allow bacterial persistence in human hosts
- Martin J. Blaser
- Denise Kirschner
Hypothesis18 Oct 2007 Nature
Emergence of cooperation and evolutionary stability in finite populations
- Martin A. Nowak
- Akira Sasaki
- Drew Fudenberg
Letter8 Apr 2004 Nature
A bargaining game analysis of international climate negotiations

Progress towards reaching an international climate agreement has been painfully slow and fraught with difficulty. This work presents a newly developed game theoretic model aimed at the conceptual clarification of some key obstacles in current international negotiations. The model is then used to suggest possible solutions to these obstacles.
- Rory Smead
- Ronald L. Sandler
- John Basl
Letter11 May 2014 Nature Climate Change

John Nash

Content

John Forbes Nash (1928–2015)

'Beautiful mind' John Nash adds Abel Prize to his Nobel

Deviating from the line

Agreeing on strategies

Reputation can enhance or suppress cooperation through positive feedback

The coevolution of choosiness and cooperation

The equilibria that allow bacterial persistence in human hosts

Emergence of cooperation and evolutionary stability in finite populations

A bargaining game analysis of international climate negotiations

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