Nash, John Forbes Jr. (1928–)

American mathematician famously but not very accurately portrayed in the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind (2001), loosely based on the biography of the same name by Sylvia Nasar (1998).¹ Nash, who worked in game theory and differential geometry, shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics with two other game theorists, Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi.

After a promising start to his mathematical career, Nash began to suffer from schizophrenia around the age of 30 and battled with the illness for the next quarter of a century. His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled "Non-cooperative Games," contained the definition and properties of what would later be called Nash equilibrium and the basis of the work that, 44 years later, would make him a Nobelist. Between 1966 and 1996, Nash published nothing. However, his mental health slowly began to recover in the mid-1990s, his ability to tackle mathematical problems returned, and he also became interested in computer programming.

Reference

Nasar, Sylvia. A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998.

Related category

• MATHEMATICIANS

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