“As a graduate student I studied mathematics fairly broadly and I was fortunate enough, besides developing the idea which led to "Non-Cooperative Games," also to make a nice discovery relating to manifolds and real algebraic varieties. So I was prepared actually for the possibility that the game theory work would not be regarded as acceptable as a thesis in the mathematics department and then that I could realize the objective of a Ph. D. thesis with the other results.”
Autobiographical essay (1994)
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John Nash 23
American mathematician and Nobel Prize laureate 1928–2015Related quotes
[The Idea of a Catholic University: A Personal Perspective, Marquette Law Review, Winter 1995: Symposium on Religiously Affiliated Law Schools, 78, 2, 389–396, http://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1579&context=mulr]

Editor's Introduction, The Teaching of Elementary Mathematics https://books.google.com/books?id=NKoAAAAAMAAJ (1906) by David Eugene Smith

David Eugene Smith, "Editor's Introduction," in: The Teaching of Elementary Mathematics https://books.google.com/books?id=NKoAAAAAMAAJ (1906)

“The universe,” says Wyvern, “is a Ph. D. thesis that God was unable to successfully defend.”
Source: Only Begotten Daughter (1990), Chapter 13 (p. 221)

"Non-cooperative Games" in Annals of Mathematics, Vol. 54, No. 2 (September 1951)<!-- ; as cited in Can and should the Nash program be looked at as a part of mechanism theory? (2003) by Walter Trockel -->
1950s
Context: The writer has developed a “dynamical” approach to the study of cooperative games based upon reduction to non-cooperative form. One proceeds by constructing a model of the preplay negotiation so that the steps of negotiation become moves in a larger non-cooperative game [which will have an infinity of pure strategies] describing the total situation. This larger game is then treated in terms of the theory of this paper [extended to infinite games] and if values are obtained they are taken as the values of the cooperative game. Thus the problem of analyzing a cooperative game becomes the problem of obtaining a suitable, and convincing, non-cooperative model for the negotiation.
The writer has, by such a treatment, obtained values for all finite two-person cooperative games, and some special n-person games.

The World of Mathematics (1956) Edited by J. R. Newman