The Collaboration between Oskar Morgenstern and John von Neumann on the Theory of Games

Datos Bibliográficos

ID20076986
AutoresOskar Morgenstern (autor de correspondencia)
Año2007
Páginas712-726
Fecha de publicación2007-12-31
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoCHAPTER
RevistaTheory of Games and Economic Behavior (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditorialPrinceton University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1515/9781400829460.712
OpenAlexW1511426164
ISBN9781400829460
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas8
Referencias citadas4

TIME AND AGAIN since the publication of The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior in 1944 the question has been asked how it came about that von Neumann, one of the greatest mathematicians of our age, and I met and worked together on what turned out to be a major piece in both our lives [20, (1944) 1953]. Recently I have been pressed by many to set down the history of the collaboration. And so I shall try to give a brief account of our mutual involvement. A fuller account with precise dates may follow some other time. My first book, entitled Wirtschaftfprognose, was published in 1928 by Springer in Vienna, Austria [10, 1928]. In that book, written in 1926-27 while a Fellow of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial and an Honorary Research Fellow at Harvard University, the whole question of economic forecasting was examined epistemologically, and the difficulties and virtual impossibilities of prediction were studied to the best of my then-existing knowledge. In my general scientific outlook I was strongly influenced by the work of Hermann Weyl, Bertrand Russell, and others in the mathematical and physical sciences. I also struggled hard with Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of 1921 [26, (1921) 1955]. At Harvard, I frequently participated in the private seminars held by the great philosopher-mathematician Alfred North Whitehead, who had just published his Science and the Modern World [25, 1925] in which, however, he began to veer more towards metaphysics than was to my thendeveloping taste. When I became a Rockefeller Fellow, I was a product of the Austrian School of Economics, having obtained my doctorate in 1925 with a piece on productivity. But I was constantly troubled by the fact that B6hm-Bawerk's theory of bargaining and of the marginal pairs, while dealing with fundamentals, could not be considered completed. This also led me, while still in Vienna, to Edgeworth's contract curve in his Mathematical Psychics [2, 1881]. On my way to the United States in 1925 I visited the aged Edgeworth in Oxford. I expressed great pleasure at the publication of his collected papers, but urged him repeatedly to republish the Mathematical Psychics, then totally out of print. His death intervened before he could carry out my suggestion, which he had accepted.'

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