Introduction

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Cold War looks ever more like a slice of history rather than a contemporary reality. During those same twenty years, scholarship on science, technology, and the state during the Cold War era has expanded dramatically. Building on major studies of physics in the American context-often couched in terms of "big science"-recent work has broached scientific efforts in other domains as well, scrutinizing Cold War scholarship in increasingly international and comparative frameworks. The essays in this Focus section take stock of current thinking about science and the Cold War, revisiting the question of how best to understand tangled (and sometimes surprising) relationships between government patronage and the world of ideas. © 2010 by The History of Science Society

Paul Erickson, The World the Game Theorists Made

Paul Erickson’s fascinating history of game theory begins by describing its subject matter not as an idea, paradigm, institution, nor even as a ‘theory,’ but as a “great sequence of debates … about the prospects for building a mathematical theory of rational decision-making.” (1) This series of debates is given coherence, both in the minds of the historical actors and in the construction of this book, by the mathematical tradition associated with “rational choice modeling,” a tradition that u..

Paul Erickson, The World the Game Theorists Made

Paul Erickson’s fascinating history of game theory begins by describing its subject matter not as an idea, paradigm, institution, nor even as a ‘theory,’ but as a “great sequence of debates … about the prospects for building a mathematical theory of rational decision-making.” (1) This series of debates is given coherence, both in the minds of the historical actors and in the construction of this book, by the mathematical tradition associated with “rational choice modeling,” a tradition that u..