Game theory is a sphere of functional mathematics that is used in the social sciences (most notably economics), biology, political science, computer science, and viewpoint. Game theory attempts to mathematically incarcerate behavior in strategic situations, in which an person success in making choices depends on the choices of others. While initially developed to evaluate competitions in which one individual does better at another's expense (zero sum games), it has been prolonged to treat a wide class of interactions, which are classified according to several criteria.

Traditional applications of game theory attempt to find equilibrium in these games?sets of strategies in which individuals are doubtful to change their conduct. Many equilibrium concepts have been urbanized (most famously the Nash equilibrium) in an attempt to capture this idea. These equilibrium concepts are aggravated differently depending on the field of application, although they often overlie or coincide. This methodology is not without criticism, and debates continue over the appropriateness of particular equilibrium concepts, the appropriateness of equilibrium altogether, and the usefulness of mathematical models more generally.

Although some developments occurred before it, the meadow of game theory came into being with the 1944 book Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. This theory was developed expansively in the 1950s by countless scholars. Game theory was later explicitly applied to natural science in the 1970s, although similar developments go back at least as far as the 1930s. Game theory has been widely recognized as an important tool in many fields. The first known discussion of game theory occurred in a letter written by James Waldegrave in 1713. In this letter, Waldegrave provides a minimax mixed strategy answer to a two-person descriptive of the card game Le Her. It was not until the pamphlet of Antoine Augustin Cournot's Researches into the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth in 1838 that a general game theoretic psychoanalysis was pursued. In this work Cournot considers a duopoly and presents a solution that is a constraint version of the Nash equilibrium.