John Forbes Nash Jr.
Birthdate: June 13, 1928
Death Date: May 23, 2015
NJ Town Affiliation: Princeton
John Forbes Nash Jr. was born on June 13, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia. He attended Carnegie Mellon University on a scholarship, graduating in 1948 with an M.S. in mathematics. That same year, Nash accepted a fellowship to pursue graduate studies at Princeton University, beginning his nearly 70 years of association with Princeton. A letter written in support of his application said simply, “This man is a genius.”
After receiving his doctorate in 1950, Dr. Nash worked as a consultant to the RAND Corporation and in 1952 as an instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was there he met Eleanor Stier and had a son, John David Stier, in June 1953. In 1957, he would marry Alicia Larde.
Dr. Nash, widely regarded as one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century, was known for the originality of his thinking and for attacking problems no one else could solve. It was in 1978 that his discovery of non-cooperative equilibria was first recognized with the John von Neumann Theory Prize, but not until 1994 that he shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for this game theory. One economist compared the impact of this theory on economics “to that of the discovery of the DNA double helix in the biological sciences.” He won the Leroy P. Steele Prize in 1999. All of this recognition was for work he had done in the early 1950s as a Princeton graduate student. During the three decades of illness that had followed, his ideas became pervasive in economics and the social sciences, and were applied in other fields, including biology.
His doctoral thesis, “Non-Cooperative Games,” appeared in September 1951 in the journal Annals of Mathematics. The “Nash equilibria” provided a powerful mathematical tool for analyzing wide ranging competitive situations. However, many mathematicians view Dr. Nash’s contributions to pure mathematics as more significant than his Nobel-winning work on game theory, particularly an intractable problem in differential geometry derived from the work of the 19th century mathematician G.F.B. Riemann that he solved.
Recognition also included several honorary doctoral degrees including from Carnegie Mellon University (1999), University of Naples Federico II (2003), University of Charleston (2003), West Virginia University Tech (2006), University of Antwerp (2007) and City University of Hong Kong (2011). Nash was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2006 and became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012.
Due to Dr. Nash’s schizophrenia that became severe in 1959, decades passed between the release of his work and its recognition. In April 1959, with his wife pregnant with his second son (John Charles Martin Nash would be born in May), Nash was first hospitalized while experiencing paranoia and delusion. Many hospitalizations would follow. Upon his release, he left MIT, went to Europe, and returned that summer to West Windsor, NJ where he would live most of his remaining years with his wife. Although divorced in 1963, Alicia took John into her home in 1970 upon his final hospital discharge. Alicia and John remarried in 2001.
Nash said he learned to consciously discard his paranoia and delusions, having simply decided to return to rationality. Princeton allowed him to audit classes and he eventually began teaching again. In 1998, a compelling but unauthorized and not entirely factually correct biography of Nash’s life, “A Beautiful Mind”, was published by Sylvia Nasar. The film of the same name, released in 2001, took further artistic license with the biographical facts. However, the accurate portrayal of schizophrenia helped the public to better understand and de-stigmatize the illness, a cause to which Dr. Nash and his wife Alica dedicated much time and energy.
On May 23, 2015, while returning home from the airport after having been in Norway to receive the Abel Prize, he and his wife died in a tragic car crash. He was 86.