John Nash shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics for analyzing equilibria in non-cooperative games.
Nash shared the award with John Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten. Their work helped establish game theory as a central tool for studying strategic decisions, in which each participant’s outcome depends partly on the choices of others.
Nash’s key contribution was the concept now called Nash equilibrium. In such an equilibrium, no player can improve their result by changing strategy alone, assuming the other players keep their strategies unchanged. The idea applies far beyond economics, including politics, biology and computer science.
A common mix-up is confusing Nash with Harsanyi or Selten, who were his co-laureates. Nash was also a mathematician rather than a conventional economics professor, and his life inspired the film A Beautiful Mind, although the prize recognized his game-theory work, not the film.