PHIL: Phil Wolfe
IRV: Irvin Lustig
IRV
What drew you to game theory?
PHIL
My main mathematical interests were in the foundations: logic, set theory, and metamathematics. I found these fascinating because they get down to the very essential ingredients.
But I got distracted in 1949. I was a regular science fiction reader. Astounding Science Fiction magazine was almost the only outlet of good science fiction in that time.
There was a story in the October 1949 issue called the "Finan-Seer." It's about a group of college professors who learned a new subject called the theory of games, and they used it to beat the stock market and build up the endowment for their university.
I had never heard of the theory of games. They used a little, tiny, two-person, zero-sum game as an example. This fascinated me.
IRV
Game theory was only a few years old in 1949.
PHIL
I was an avid game player. Chess, Go were some of my favorite board games. I played a lot of Ping-Pong, too. The idea that there was a mathematical theory of games absolutely fascinated me. I rushed out and bought the Von Neumann and Morgenstern book and started studying it. I realized there was some real mathematics in this, and decided that's what I wanted to do my graduate work in.
It took me a while to find someone who would agree that that was a reasonable topic for a dissertation. Edward Barankin, in the statistics department at UC Berkeley, who had done a little work in linear programming, was acquainted with the theory of games and consented to act as my thesis advisor. This was 1949, early 1950.
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