Winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics. He became known to a wider audience when he was portrayed by Russell Crowe in the movie "A Beautiful Mind".
John Forbes Nash is an American mathematician born in 1928. Nash, who studies game theory and differential geometry, is the recipient of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics. He became known to a wider audience when he was portrayed by Russell Crowe in the movie "A Beautiful Mind".
John Forbes Nash, Jr. (June 13, 1928 – May 23, 2015), known and published as John Nash, was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to game theory, real algebraic geometry, differential geometry, and partial differential equations. Nash and fellow game theorists John Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten were awarded the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. In 2015, he and Louis Nirenberg were awarded the Abel Prize for their contributions to the field of partial differential equations.
John Forbes Nash was born on June 13, 1928, in West Virginia, USA. Father John Nash, who bears the same name as his son, is an electrical engineer, a graduate of Texas A&M University, and mother, Margaret Virginia Martin, a Latin and English teacher, a graduate of West Virginia University. On November 16, 1930, his sister Martha was born. As a child, Nash read the illustrated encyclopedia Compton's Picture Encyclopedia and learned a lot.
At the age of 12, he began experimenting on himself at home. It was clear back then that he liked being by himself, not working with people. His sister was a normal kid, but Nash was very different from other kids. Their games and jokes seemed strange to Nash; He soon isolated himself from everyone. Since his parents saw Nash's interest in books, they began to treat him like an adult and encourage his education.
The work that revealed Nash's love of mathematics was Bell's "Men of Mathematics", which he read during his high school years. While he was in high school, he started taking classes at Bluefield College. After graduating from high school, he enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology on a Westinghouse scholarship; His major was chemical engineering. However, Nash left this department and moved on to mathematics. He received both his bachelor's and master's degrees in 1948. After graduating, he started working on a Navy project.
Nash later went to Princeton University to work on "Equalization Theory". He had been offered both Princeton and Harvard University offers, but he chose to go to Princeton, thanks to its proximity to Bluefield, where his family lived, and the interest shown by his academics to Nash. He received his doctorate from here in 1950. His doctoral thesis was one of the most important parts of "Game Theory", which would later be called "Nash Equilibrium". This study brought with it 3 articles; “Equilibrium Points in N-person Games” (1950), “The Bargaining Problem” (1950), and “Two-person Cooperative Games” (1953). He also made important studies in the field of algebraic geometry. He began teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1951. He resigned from this post in 1959.
The 1998 John Nash biography "A Beautiful Mind" talked about Nash's homosexual relationships. He had not hidden this since his university years and was not tolerated by his environment. The author of the book described how Nash and his college boyfriends kissed in the boardroom and were not afraid of such behavior. However, this situation was not accepted while he was working in government jobs after university, and he was even arrested and fired for "inappropriate behavior". In an interview with his wife, Alicia, Alicia said that Nash is not gay or bisexual, but Nash has never publicly denied the rumors.
Nash began to show signs of schizophrenia in 1958. However, during his 4 years at Princeton (1945-1949), he thought he had a roommate, even though it was recorded that he lived alone. In the hospital where he was admitted in 1959, he was diagnosed with insecurity, depression, and paranoid schizophrenia. After living for a while in Paris and Geneva, he returned to Princeton in 1960, hospitalized several times until 1970. During these years, he decided to stop his drug treatment. According to her biographer, Sylvia Nasar, she slowly started to recover, and her husband gave her great support in the process.
Nash began reaping the rewards of his work in 1978. He received the "John Von Neumann Theory Award" this year, the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994, and the "Leroy P. Steele Prize" in 1999.
The 2001 movie "A Beautiful Mind" was inspired by the life of John Nash and the movie won 4 Academy Awards. The script was based on the biography of the same name. However, there were inconsistencies between this biography and Nash's real life.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he met Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Lardé, a physics student from El Salvador. The two got married in February 1957. In 1959, he admitted his wife, Nash, to a mental hospital for treatment for schizophrenia. Immediately after this event, their son John Charles Martin was born; but it was not named for 1 year. Because Alicia wanted her husband to give an opinion on this matter. John Martin became a mathematician like his father and was later diagnosed with schizophrenia. Nash also had a child with Eleanor Stier, born on June 19, 1953. However, he showed no interest in either the mother or the child.
Alicia Lopez-John Nash divorced in 1963 and reunited in 1970. The couple, who were offended and reconciled since this date, made the analogy of "two strangers under the same roof" about themselves. After Nash won the Nobel Prize in 1994, they broke up and remarried on June 1, 2001.
Nash published 23 scholarly works between 1945 and 1996, as well as authored "Essays on Game Theory" (1996) and "The Essential John Nash".
John Nash died as a result of an accident caused by the taxi he was in in the state of New Jersey, USA. His wife, who was with the mathematician, also died in the accident.