Nash's report and a hex-history page in Hayward's course webspace jointly place Hex's 1948 Princeton reintroduction within a circle: Nash, David Gale, John Milnor, and Robert Enderton

hexgame-theoryjohn-nashdavid-galejohn-milnorprincetonhistory-of-mathematics

A hex-history page in Ryan Hayward's own University of Alberta course webspace (CMPUT 355) states the 1948 Princeton reintroduction of Hex plainly: "1948 John Nash and David Gale introduce game to Princeton game theory group, including John Milnor, Robert Enderton." This names four people the vault had not previously linked into a single group: Nash and David Gale as the two who brought the game to the group, and John Milnor and Robert Enderton as members who received it.

Nash's own 1952 RAND report independently corroborates part of the same circle, without naming it as a circle: describing a related game, he writes, "'Triangle' is a game of this type originally discovered by J. W. Milnor and rediscovered at Bell Labs" — placing Milnor, in Nash's own hand, in the same small milieu of people inventing and reinventing board games around Hex. The corroboration is partial: Nash's line establishes Milnor's presence among the same game-inventors, not specifically his membership in the 1948 group that received Hex from Nash and Gale; that fuller enumeration, and Robert Enderton's presence in it, rests on Hayward's page alone.

Gale's existing vault presence was, until this note, limited to his 1979 paper proving Hex's no-draw property equivalent to the Brouwer fixed-point theorem — thirty-one years after this earlier, informal role placing him alongside Nash at the game's Princeton reintroduction.