John Masson Smith, Jr. (1930–2019)

John Maynard Smith.

John Maynard Smith was one of the most original thinkers in evolutionary biology of the post neo-Darwinian synthesis age. He was able to define new problems with clarity and by doing so open up new research directions. He did this in a number of areas including game theory and evolution, the evolution of sex, animal behavior, evolutionary transitions and molecular evolution. Although he is best...

John Forbes Nash Jr . ( 1928 – 2015 )

John Forbes Nash Jr. was born in Bluefield, West Virginia, on June 13, 1928 and was named after his father, who was an electrical engineer. His mother, Margaret Virginia (née Martin), was a school teacher before her marriage, teaching English and sometimes Latin. After attending the standard schools in Bluefield, Nash entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie Mell...

John Maynard Smith (1920–2004)

John Maynard Smith, who died of lung cancer last month at the age of 84, was one of the most influential evolutionary biologists of his generation. He grew up in rural Somerset and was educated at Eton College. There he was stimulated by the writings of J.B.S. Haldane, a life-long influence. As he explained in the introduction to his collection of Haldane’s writings On Being the Right Size, “I ...

Mathematicians as Great Economists : John Forbes Nash , Jr . Matthew

ly conceived, a two-person bargaining problem consists of a set of feasible contracts, with associated payoffs to each bargainer. As Edgeworth, von Neumann and Morgenstern, and others had observed, it is reasonable to suppose that the chosen contract will satisfy: • Efficiency: No other feasible contract offers both bargainers a higher payoff. However, this requirement typically leaves a large ...

John H. Gibbon, Jr., Lecture: leadership in medicine.