John Forbes Nash is an American Mathematician who works on game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations. He serves as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton University. With two other game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi he shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics. He is best known through the movie, A Beautiful Mind which was made upon this mathematical genius. At present he is struggling with Schizophrenia.
John Nash was born on 13th June, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia, U.S. From his childhood he was different but bright. At the age of 12 he was carrying out scientific experiments alone in his room. It was quite unlike that at that young age he did not like working with other people. With intellectual superiority he returned the social rejection of his classmates.
John Nash told that E.T. Bells book – Men of Mathematics and the essay on Fermat first sparked his interest in mathematics. When still at high school he used to attend the classes at Bluefield College. Later he attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology, todays Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on a Westinghouse scholarship. Before switching to mathematics he studied chemical engineering and chemistry. He received his bachelors degree and his masters degree in same year, 1948, from Carnegie Institute.
John Nash worked on navy research project in White Oak, Maryland after completing his graduation. He was accepted by Harvard University, his first choice but wanted earnestly to be the chairman of Princeton University. So to work on equilibrium theory he went to Princeton University from White Oak. He earned his PhD with a dissertation on non-cooperative games in 1950. His thesis, containing the definition and properties of what later is called the Nash Equilibrium, was written under the supervision of Albert W. Tucker. His Nash equilibrium explained three articles – 1) Equilibrium Points in N-person Games, 2) The Bargaining Problem, and 3) Two-person Cooperative games. There are many of Nashs important work in the area of algebraic geometry.
John Nashs most famous work in pure mathematics was the Nash embedding theorem. He also contributed in the theory of parabolic partial differential equations. As a C.L.E. Moore Instructor in the mathematics faculty Nash went to Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951. There he met Alicia Lopez-Harison, a physics student and married her in February 1957. Nash was admitted to mental hospital before their son was born who remained nameless for a year because in this case Alicia thought his husband should have a say. Nash and Alicia divorced in 1963 but reunited in 1970. They used to live as two housemates. According to Nashs biography A Beautiful Mind the couple remarried on June 1, 2001.
John Nash was also awarded the John Von Neumann Theory Prize in 1978, for his non-cooperative Equilibrium. He won Leory P Steele Prize in 1999. Nashs recent work involves his venture in advanced game theory. He has created two popular games - Hex and So Long Sucker in 1964.
John Nash
