John Nash
Mathematician, Nobel Prize in Economics 1994 for game theory
Born 1928 · Died 2015
Photo: Peter Badge / Typos1 · CC BY-SA 3.0
«Rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos.»
John Nash invented the equilibrium concept that bears his name, which describes what happens when everyone in a competition plays their best response to everyone else. He developed schizophrenia in his early thirties, lost three decades to it, recovered, and lived to collect a Nobel Prize.
Key achievements
- Nobel Prize in Economics, 1994, for game theory
- Nash equilibrium, from a 27-page doctoral thesis
- Abel Prize, 2015, for work on partial differential equations
Universities
Princeton, New Jersey
Took his PhD in 1950 with a 27-page thesis on non-cooperative games, then returned as a senior research mathematician.
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Took his bachelor's and master's degrees in mathematics at what was then Carnegie Institute of Technology.
Facts
- His entire doctoral thesis was 27 pages long and cited two sources, one of them his own earlier paper.
- His recommendation letter to Princeton consisted of a single sentence: this man is a genius.
- Students at Princeton called him the Phantom of Fine Hall for the years when he wandered the mathematics building leaving equations on blackboards.
- The film A Beautiful Mind, based on his life, won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2002.
Photographs
Photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences; the author and licence are shown on each image.