The Life and Times of John

Forbes Nash.
By Amy Hodgins and Robyn Kierans

John Forbes Nash (June 13, 1928 May 23, 2015)

Early Life:
Nash was born on June 13th 1928, in Bluefield, West Virginia, United States. He attended
kindergarten and public school, and he learned from books provided by his parents and grandparents.
Nash's parents arranged for him to take advanced mathematics courses at a local community college
during his final year of high school. He attended Carnegie Institute of Technology through a full benefit
of the George Westinghouse Scholarship, initially majoring in chemical engineering. He then switched
to a chemistry major and eventually, after advice from his teacher John Lighton Synge, he switched to
mathematics.
After graduating in 1948 (aged 19) with both a B.S. and M.S. in mathematics, Nash accepted a
scholarship to Princeton University, where he pursued further graduate studies in mathematics.
Nash's adviser and former High School professor, Richard Duffin, wrote a letter of recommendation for
Nash's entrance to Princeton, in which he stated; "He is a mathematical genius.
Game theory was the subject of Nash's doctoral dissertation at Princeton University. He worked on his
equilibrium theory, later known as the Nash equilibrium.

Contributions to Mathematics and Awards:

John Forbes Nash Jr. was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to
game theory, differential geometry, and the study of partial differential equations. Nash's work has
provided insight into the factors that govern chance and decision making inside complex systems
found in daily life.
His theories are used in economics. Serving as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton
University during the latter part of his life, he shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic
Sciences with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi. In 2015, he was awarded the Abel
Prize in Norway for his work on nonlinear partial differential equations.
Nash earned a Ph.D. degree in 1950 with a 28-page dissertation on non-cooperative games. The
thesis, which was written under the supervision of doctoral advisor Albert W. Tucker, contained the
definition and properties of the Nash equilibrium. A crucial concept in noncooperative games, it won
Nash the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994.

Effects Nash had on Mathematicians and Society:

Nash developed work on the role of money in

society. Within the framing theorem that people
can be so controlled and motivated by money
that they may not be able to reason rationally
about it. He criticized interest groups that
promote quasi-doctrines based on Keynesian
economics that permit manipulative short-term
inflation and debt tactics that ultimately
undermine currencies. He suggested a global
"industrial consumption price index" system that
would support the development of more "ideal
money" that people could trust rather than more
unstable "bad money". He noted that some of
his thinking paralleled economist and political
philosopher Friedrich Hayek's thinking regarding
money and a non-typical viewpoint of the
function of the authorities.

Later life:
In 1958, Nash earned a tenured position at MIT,
and his first signs of mental illness were evident
in early 1959. He resigned his position as a
member of the MIT mathematics faculty in the
spring of 1959 and his wife had him admitted to
McLean Hospital for treatment of schizophrenia
that same year. Their son, John Charles Martin
Nash, was born soon afterward. After his final
hospital discharge in 1970, Nash lived in de
Lard's house as a boarder, following their
divorce. He learned how to discard his paranoid
delusions. He stopped taking psychiatric
medication and was allowed by Princeton to
audit classes. He continued to work on
mathematics. Eventually he was allowed to
teach again. At Princeton, Nash became known
as "The Phantom of Fine Hall" (Princeton's
mathematics center), a shadowy figure who

would scribble arcane equations on

blackboards in the middle of the night. He is
referred to in a novel set at Princeton, The
Mind-Body Problem, 1983, by Rebecca
Goldstein. Sylvia Nasar's biography of Nash
A Beautiful Mind, was published in 1998. A
film by the same name was released in 2001;
it won four Academy Awards, including Best
Picture. Russell Crowe played Nash.
On May 23rd, 2015, Nash and his wife were
killed in a vehicle collision in New Jersey.
They had been on their way home from the
airport after a visit to Norway, where Nash
had received the Abel Prize for his
contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial
differential equations and its applications to
geometric analysis.

A Beautiful
Mind- film based
on the biography
of John Forbes
Nash.