

Cardano's work on games of chance in Liber de ludo aleae ( Book on Games of Chance), which was written around 1564 but published posthumously in 1663, formulated some of the field's basic ideas.

Game theory has been widely recognized as an important tool in many fields.

It was explicitly applied to evolution in the 1970s, although similar developments go back at least as far as the 1930s. Game theory was developed extensively in the 1950s by many scholars. The second edition of this book provided an axiomatic theory of expected utility, which allowed mathematical statisticians and economists to treat decision-making under uncertainty. His paper was followed by the 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, co-written with Oskar Morgenstern, which considered cooperative games of several players. Von Neumann's original proof used the Brouwer fixed-point theorem on continuous mappings into compact convex sets, which became a standard method in game theory and mathematical economics. Modern game theory began with the idea of mixed-strategy equilibria in two-person zero-sum game and its proof by John von Neumann. In the 21st century, game theory applies to a wide range of behavioral relations, and is now an umbrella term for the science of logical decision making in humans, animals, and computers. Originally, it addressed two-person zero-sum games, in which each participant's gains or losses are exactly balanced by those of other participants. It has applications in all fields of social science, as well as in logic, systems science and computer science. Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions among rational agents.
