This is the short edition of Morales, first broadcast on the BBC World Service.

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Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service.

I'm Tim Halford.

On the 23rd of May, the mathematician John Nash was killed in a car crash alongside his wife, Alicia.

The couple were in their 80s.

Professor Nash was on his way home from Norway after receiving the prestigious Able Prize for Mathematics.

He also won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1994 for his work on an idea called Game Theory.

And he was made famous far beyond academia when he was played by Russell Crowe in the film A Beautiful Mind.

I discussed John Nash's life and his work on Game Theory with Peyton Young,

whose professor of economics at Oxford University.

In a nutshell, Game Theory is a theory of interactive decision-making.

It's a theory in which not one person is making a decision, but several,

perhaps the large numbers of people are making decisions whose outcomes all impinge on one another.

Thus, when I make a choice, it will affect you.

Your choice will affect me.

We know this, and that leads to a game.

And Nash didn't invent Game Theory, but he was a very important figure in it.

He did not invent Game Theory.

Actually, Game Theory goes back quite a long ways.

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