A Beautiful Mind

John von Neumann, a brilliant polymath and lecturer at Princeton, enters the mathematics common room and sees a pair of students playing a game in which counters are placed in hexagonal places on a rhomboid playing board. When he asks the students what they are doing, they tell him they are playing “Nash.”

When the European professors moved to Princeton in the 1930s, they brought with them a tradition of playing games. In Nash’s first year at the university, Kriegspiel and Go are both highly popular with the students. Nash plays them often and with an “unusually aggressive” approach, the games bringing out his “natural competitiveness and one-upmanship” (76)

Notably, however, Nash does not only play games but invents one, known as ‘Nash.’ The game’s most notable feature is that it is a zero-sum two-person game, like chess or tic-tac-toe, which, unlike these games, cannot end in a draw. In fact, “even if both players try to lose, one will win, like it or not” (78). More than this, as Nash himself excitedly points out to a fellow student when he invents it, “There’s no luck, just pure strategy” (77). The game proves incredibly popular and is regularly played in the common room.