When John Nash wrote “Non-Coop­er­a­tive Games,” his Ph.D. dis­ser­ta­tion at Prince­ton in 1950, the textual content of his the­sis (read it online) was temporary. It ran solely 26 pages. And extra par­tic­u­lar­ly, it was gentle on cita­tions. Nash’s diss cit­ed two texts: John von Neu­mann and Oskar Mor­gen­stern’s The­o­ry of Games and Eco­nom­ic Behav­ior (1944), which essen­tial­ly cre­at­ed recreation the­o­ry and rev­o­lu­tion­ized the sector of eco­nom­ics; the oth­er cit­ed textual content, “Equi­lib­ri­um Points in n‑Person Games,” was an arti­cle writ­ten by Nash him­self. And it laid the foun­da­tion for his dis­ser­ta­tion, anoth­er sem­i­nal work within the devel­op­ment of recreation the­o­ry, for which Nash was award­ed the Nobel Prize in Eco­nom­ic Sci­ences in 1994.

The reward of invent­ing a brand new area is hav­ing a slim bib­li­og­ra­phy.

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