Millions have seen the movie and thousands have read the book but few have fully appreciated the mathematics invented by John Nash’s beautiful mind. Today Nash’s beautiful math has become a universal language for research in the social sciences and has infiltrated the realms of evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and even quantum physics.

John Nash won the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics for pioneering research published in the 1950s on a new branch of mathematics known as game theory. At the time of Nash’s early work, game theory was briefly popular among some mathematicians and Cold War analysts. But it remained relatively obscure until the 1970s, when evolutionary biologists began to find it useful. In the 1980s economists began to embrace game theory. Since then game theory math has found an ever expanding repertoire of applications among a wide range of scientific disciplines.

Today neuroscientists peer into game players’ brains, anthropologists play games with people from primitive cultures, biologists use games to explain the evolution of human language, and mathematicians exploit games to better understand social networks.

A common thread connecting much of this research is its relevance to the ancient quest for a science of human social behavior, or "a Code of Nature," in the spirit of the fictional science of psychohistory described in the famous Foundation novels by the late Isaac Asimov. In A Beautiful Math, acclaimed science writer Tom Siegfried describes how game theory links the life sciences, social sciences and physical sciences in a way that may bring Asimov’s dream closer to reality.

About the Author
Tom Siegfried was science editor of the Dallas Morning News for 20 years and currently writes a regular column for the science news website The Why Files.

In 1993 he received the American Chemical Society’s James H. Grady-James T. Stack Award for Interpreting Chemistry for the Public; in 2004 he received the National Association of Science Writers’ Science-in-Society award; and in 2006 he was awarded the American Geophysical Union’s Robert C. Cowen award for lifetime achievement in science journalism.

He is the author of The Bit and the Pendulum, published in 2000, and Strange Matters, published in 2002. Tom lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Chris.

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Hardcover: 272 pages
Author: Tom Siegfried
Publisher: Joseph Henry Press (September 25, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0309101921
ISBN-13: 978-0309101929

Introduction

Could not mind, as well as mindless motion, have an underlying order?
—Emperor Cleon to Hari Seldon, Prelude to Foundation

Isaac Asimov excelled at predicting the future.

In one of his early science fiction stories, he introduced pocket calculators decades before you could buy them at Radio Shack. In a later book, he described a digital camera transmitting photos directly to a computer via WiFi.

He just forgot to mention that you could also use the same device to make phone calls. And in his most celebrated work, a series of 1950s science fiction novels known as the Foundation Trilogy, Asimov foresaw a new kind of science called psychohistory, capable itself of forecasting political, economic, and social events. Psychohistory, as Asimov envisioned it, was “the science of human behavior reduced to mathematical equations.”

Real-life psychohistory does not yet exist—not now, not really, and not for a long time. But there are many research enterprises under way in the world today that share the goal of better understanding human behavior in order to foresee the future. At the foundation of these enterprises are mathematical methods closely resembling Asimov’s psychohistory. And in the midst of it all is the work of a mathematician named John Forbes Nash. ...

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