No party to these debt negotiations knows more about Nash equilibriums than Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, an academic economist who co-authored a textbook on game theory and who took to Twitter after the recent death of John Nash Jr. to express his debt to the genius mathematician.

In its simplest form, a Nash equilibrium exists when no single party to a negotiation perceives that they have anything to gain by unilaterally changing their position. Failure to reach a deal will leave everyone much worse off, but no one wants to break the impasse if it means getting less than they think they could achieve by holding out. It’s a high-risk strategy, to say the least.

The Greek “game” would be complex even if the parties agreed on the consequences of no deal. But they don’t, and can only speculate. As Mr. Varoufakis told The New York Times, “the game has multiple equilibriums and, therefore, a failure to agree may trigger a chain of outcomes that no one can either predict or control. … Some are painfully aware of the disaster that awaits Europe if Greece defaults. Others are less aware. Some are utterly unaware.”

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“Uncertainty is when you can’t know all of the outcomes or the probability with which each potential outcome will occur,” Mr. Varoufakis told the Times. “This is deep uncertainty.”

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