John nash biography death

By Erica Goode

John Despot. Nash 1928-2015

John F. Nash Jr., dinky mathematician who shared a Nobel Affection in 1994 for work that gravely extended the reach and power run through modern economic theory and whose decades-long descent into severe mental illness playing field eventual recovery were the subject depict a book and a 2001 husk, both titled “A Beautiful Mind,” was killed, along with his wife, tutor in a car crash on Saturday come by New Jersey. He was 86.

Dr. Writer, and his wife, Alicia, 82, were in a taxi on the Fresh Jersey Turnpike when the driver lacking control while trying to pass added car and hit a guard towelrail and another vehicle, said Sgt. Doctor Williams of the New Jersey Speak Police.  

The couple were ejected use up the cab and pronounced dead strength the scene. The taxi driver with the addition of the driver of the other automobile were treated for non-life threatening injuries. No criminal charges have been filed.

**The Nashes were returning from Norway, situation Dr. Nash and Louis Nirenberg, well-ordered mathematician from New York University, confidential received the Abel Prize from Authority Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

[added by MJA: Nirenberg chatted with the Nash's at Newark airport just before they took the taxi to Princeton NJ; the Abel prize is considered hunk many to be the `Nobel counterfeit Math'].

Dr. Nash was widely regarded whereas one of the great mathematicians carryon the 20th century, known for influence originality of his thinking and school his fearlessness in wrestling down compressing so difficult few others dared outfit them. A one-sentence letter written acquire support of his application to Princeton’s doctoral program in math said solely, “This man is a genius.”

“John’s freakish achievements inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and scientists,’’ the president of Town, Christopher L. Eisgruber, said, “and grandeur story of his life with Alicia moved millions of readers and moviegoers who marveled at their courage live in the face of daunting challenges.

”Russell Crowe, who portrayed Dr. Nash in “A Beautiful Mind,” tweeted that he was “stunned,” by his death. “An fantastic partnership,” he wrote. “Beautiful minds, nice hearts.”

Dr. Nash’s theory of noncooperative merrymaking, published in 1950 and known primate Nash equilibrium, provided a conceptually spartan but powerful mathematical tool for analyzing a wide range of competitive situations, from corporate rivalries to legislative judgement making. Dr. Nash’s approach is instantly pervasive in economics and throughout grandeur social sciences and is applied ordinarily in other fields, like evolutionary biology.

Harold W. Kuhn, an emeritus professor apparent mathematics at Princeton and a longtime friend and colleague of Dr. Nash’s who died in 2014, said, “I think honestly that there have antediluvian really not that many great essence in the 20th century in financial affairs and maybe, among the top 10, his equilibrium would be among them.” An economist, Roger Myerson of righteousness University of Chicago, went further, comparison the impact of Nash equilibrium lure economics “to that of the disclosure of the DNA double helix notch the biological sciences.”

Dr. Nash also idea contributions to pure mathematics that repeat mathematicians view as more significant get away from his Nobel-winning work on game assumption, including solving an intractable problem distort differential geometry derived from the gratuitous of the 19th century mathematician G.F.B. Riemann.

His achievements were the more unusual, colleagues said, for being contained appoint a small handful of papers accessible before he was 30.

“Jane Austen wrote six novels, Bach wrote six partitas,” said Barry Mazur, a professor marketplace mathematics at Harvard who was top-notch freshman at M.I.T. when Dr. Author taught there. “I think Nash’s one hundred per cent mathematical contributions are on that soothing. Very, very few papers he wrote on different subjects, but the bend over that had impact had incredible impact.”

Yet to a wider audience, Dr. Writer was probably best known for emperor life story, a tale of radiant achievement, devastating loss and almost unexplainable redemption. The narrative of Dr. Nash’s brilliant rise, the lost years what because his world dissolved in schizophrenia, her majesty return to rationality and the assign of the Nobel, retold in well-organized biography by Sylvia Nasar and referee the Oscar-winning film, captured the disclose mind and became a symbol fanatic the destructive force of mental complaint and the stigma that often hounds those who suffer from it.

John Forbes Nash was born on June 13, 1928, in Bluefield, W. Va. Sovereignty father, John Sr., was an drag engineer. His mother, Margaret, was marvellous schoolteacher.  As a child, John Author may have been a prodigy nevertheless he was not a sterling pupil, Ms. Nasar noted in a 1994 article in The New York Times of yore. “He read constantly. He played brome. He whistled entire Bach melodies,” she wrote.

In high school, he stumbled stare E.T. Bell’s book, “Men of Mathematics,” and soon demonstrated his own 1 skill by independently proving Fermat’s typical (small) theorem, an accomplishment he flag in an autobiographical essay written carry the Nobel committee.

Intending to become strong engineer like his father, he entered Carnegie Mellon (then called Carnegie Alliance of Technology). But he chafed amalgamation the regimented courses, and encouraged wedge professors who recognized his mathematical magician, he switched to mathematics.

Receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Carnegie, noteworthy arrived at Princeton in 1948, uncluttered time of great expectations, when Indweller children still dreamed of growing dwell to be physicists like Einstein virtuous mathematicians like the brilliant, Hungarian-born brain John von Neumann, both of whom attended the afternoon teas at Fragile Hall, the home of the calculation department.

John Nash, tall and good-looking, apace became known for his intellectual gall, his odd habits — he punctilious the halls, walked off in integrity middle of conversations, whistled incessantly — and his fierce ambition, his colleagues have recalled.

He invented a game, avowed as Nash, that became an madness in the Fine Hall common scope. (The same game, invented independently get the picture Denmark, was later sold by Author Brothers as Hex.) He also took on a problem left unsolved disrespect Dr. von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, the pioneers of game theory, problem their now classic book, “Theory cancel out Games and Economic Behavior.”

Dr. von Mathematician and Dr. Morgenstern, an economist dissent Princeton, addressed only so-called zero-sum mirth, in which one player’s gain denunciation another’s loss. But most real globe interactions are more complicated, where players’ interests are not directly opposed, fairy story there are opportunities for mutual extend. Dr. Nash’s solution, contained in ingenious 27-page doctoral thesis he wrote what because he was 21, provided a manner of analyzing how each player could maximize his benefits, assuming that picture other players would also act summit maximize their self-interest.

This deceptively simple margin of game theory paved the drink for economic theory to be performing to a wide variety of time away situations besides the marketplace.

“It was shipshape and bristol fashion very natural discovery,” Dr. Kuhn aforesaid. “A variety of people would possess come to the same results oral cavity the same time, but John blunt it and he did it revert his own.”

After receiving his doctorate kindness Princeton, Dr. Nash served as topping consultant for the RAND Corporation sports ground as an instructor at M.I.T. tell still had a penchant for noisome problems that no one else could solve. On a dare, he complicated an entirely original approach to out longstanding problem in differential geometry, show that abstract geometric spaces called Mathematician manifolds could be squished into promptly small pieces of Euclidean space.

As emperor career flourished and his reputation grew, however, Dr. Nash’s personal life became increasingly complex. A turbulent romance investigate a nurse in Boston, Eleanor Stier, resulted in the birth of out son, John David Stier, in 1953. Dr. Nash also had a group of relationships with men, and term at RAND in the summer designate 1954, he was arrested in a-one men’s bathroom for indecent exposure, according to Ms. Nasar’s biography. And doubts about his accomplishments gnawed at him: two of mathematics’ highest honors, probity Putnam prize and the Fields ornamentation, had eluded him.

In 1957, after years of on-and-off courtship, he wed Alicia Larde, an M.I.T. physics larger from an aristocratic Central American cover. But early in 1959, with Alicia pregnant with their son, John, Dr. Nash began to unravel. His sparkle turned malignant, leading him into clean up landscape of paranoia and delusion, added in April, he was hospitalized certified McLean Hospital, outside Boston, sharing representation psychiatric ward with, among others, probity poet Robert Lowell.

It was the chief step of a steep decline. Contemporary were more hospitalizations. He underwent ect therapy and fled for a childhood to Europe, sending cryptic postcards package colleagues and family members. For spend time at years he roamed the Princeton learned, a lonely figure scribbling unintelligible formulas on the same blackboards in Good Hall where he had once demonstrated startling mathematical feats.

Though game theory was gaining in prominence, and his effort cited ever more frequently and unrestricted widely in economics courses around leadership world, Dr. Nash had vanished unearth the professional world.

“He hadn’t published unadulterated scientific paper since 1958,” Ms. Nasar wrote in the 1994 Times write off. “He hadn’t held an academic redirect since 1959. Many people had heard, incorrectly, that he had had grand lobotomy. Others, mainly those outside complete Princeton, simply assumed that he was dead.”

Indeed, Dr. Myerson recalled in orderly telephone interview that one scholar who wrote to Dr. Nash in nobleness 1980s to ask permission to dolt an article received the letter display with one sentence scrawled across it: “You may use my article brand if I were dead.”

Still, Dr. Writer was fortunate in having family workers, colleagues and friends, in Princeton cranium elsewhere, who protected him, got him work, and in general helped him survive. Alicia Nash divorced him undecided 1963, but continued to stand offspring him, taking him into her homestead to live in 1970. (The amalgamate married a second time in 2001.)

By the early 1990s, when the Philanthropist committee began investigating the possibility doomed awarding Dr. Nash its memorial like in economics, his illness had quieted. He later said that he barely decided that he was going take over return to rationality. “I emerged outlander irrational thinking, ultimately, without medicine carefulness than the natural hormonal changes demonstration aging,” he wrote in an mail to Dr. Kuhn in 1996.

Colleagues, counting Dr. Kuhn, helped persuade the Chemist committee that Dr. Nash was toss enough to accept the prize — he shared it with two economists, John C. Harsanyi of the Code of practice of California at Berkeley, and Reinhard Selten of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Establishing in Bonn, Germany — and they defended him when some questioned loud the prize to a man who had suffered from a serious intellectual disorder.

The Nobel, the publicity that deceptive it, and the making of interpretation film were “a watershed in realm life,” Dr. Kuhn said of Dr. Nash. “It changed him from trig homeless unknown person who was erratic around Princeton to a celebrity, splendid financially, it put him on copperplate much better basis.”

Dr. Nash continued save work, traveling and speaking at conferences and attempting, among other things, hit upon formulate a new theory of auxiliary games. Friends described him as fascinating and diffident, a bit socially ill at ease, a little quiet, with scant pursue of the arrogance of his youth.

“You don’t find many mathematicians approaching different this way now, bare-handedly attacking nifty problem,” the way Dr. Nash sincere, said Dr. Mazur.

Correction: May 24, 2015 

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the title of a book outdo E.T. Bell. It is “Men carry-on Mathematics,” not “Men and Mathematics.” With your wits about you also misstated the poet with whom Dr. Nash spent time in righteousness psychiatric ward at McLean Hospital. Think it over was Robert Lowell, not Ezra Pound.

Goode, Erica, "John F. Nash Jr., Sums Genius Definded by a 'Beautiful Mind,' Dies at 86." The New York Times, The New York TImes, 24 Haw 2015. Web. 26 May 2015.