John Forbes Nash Jr. was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to game theory, differential geometry, and the study of partial differential equations. He shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi. In 2015, he also shared the Abel Prize with Louis Nirenberg for his work on nonlinear partial differential equation. On May 23, 2015, Nash and his wife Alicia died in a car crash while riding in a taxi on the New Jersey Turnpike.
About John Forbes Nash Jr. in brief
John Forbes Nash Jr. was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to game theory, differential geometry, and the study of partial differential equations. His work has provided insight into the factors that govern chance and decision-making inside complex systems found in everyday life. He shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi. In 2015, he also shared the Abel Prize with Louis Nirenberg for his work on nonlinear partial differential equation. On May 23, 2015, Nash and his wife Alicia died in a car crash while riding in a taxi on the New Jersey Turnpike. In 1959, Nash began showing clear signs of mental illness, and spent several years at psychiatric hospitals being treated for paranoid schizophrenia. After 1970, his condition slowly improved, allowing him to return to academic work by the mid-1980s. His struggles with his illness and his recovery became the basis for Sylvia Nasar’s biography, A Beautiful Mind, as well as a film of the same name starring Russell Crowe as Nash. In 1956, he suffered a severe disappointment when he learned that an Italian mathematician, Ennio Giorgi, had published a proof just months before Nash achieved his goal. He learned that each mathematician took different routes to get their solutions to their mathematicians’ problems. He is the only person to be awarded both the Nobel Memorial prize in Economic sciences and the Abel prize. He was married to Alicia Nash, his wife of more than 50 years, and they had three children.
Nash was a graduate of Princeton University, where he earned a PhD in 1950 with a 28-page dissertation on non-cooperative games. His thesis, written under the supervision of doctoral advisor Albert W. Tucker, contained the definition and properties of the Nash equilibrium, a crucial concept in non- cooperative games, It won Nash the Nobel memorial prize in 1994. Nash did groundbreaking work in the area of real algebraic geometry: His work in mathematics includes the Nash embedding theorem, which shows that every abstract Riemannian manifold can be isometrically realized as a submanifold of Euclidean space. He also made significant contributions to the theory of nonlinear parabolicpartial differential equations and to singularity theory. Nash’s life is as impossible as his work is as his life is in the story of his life: his work opened a new world of mathematics that stretches in front of our eyes in yet unknown directions and waits to be explored. He had a younger sister, Martha. Nash attended kindergarten and public school, and he learned from books provided by his parents and grandparents. His father, John Forbes Nash, was an electrical engineer for the Appalachian Electric Power Company. His mother, Margaret Virginia Nash, had been a schoolteacher before she was married. He was baptized in the Episcopal Church. Nash’s parents pursued opportunities to supplement their son’s education, and arranged for him to take advanced mathematics courses at a local community college during his final year of high school.
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