John Forbes Nash Biography

John Forbes Nash Jr was a mathematician from the United States, recognized for his specialty and contributions in game theory, differential geometry and partial differential equations, which earned him a Nobel Prize in Economics. He was born on June 13, 1928, in Bluefield, West Virginia, and is the son of Margaret Virginia Martin and John Forbes Nash.

In 1941, he began his studies at the Bluefield College. In his childhood, he liked to be alone since he preferred to spend time reading than playing with children. From the age of 14, he became interested in mathematics and chemistry.

He managed to win a scholarship to pursue higher studies and in the month of June 1945, he enrolled at Carnegie Mellon University where he studied chemical engineering. One of his teachers realized his excellent math skills and managed to convince him to specialize in them. For the year 1948, he graduated, and also accepted a scholarship from Princeton University to do a Ph.D. in mathematics.

In the course of his doctoral studies, John Forbes Nash became interested in topology, geometric algebra, and game theory. For the year 1949, as part of his research, he published in the Annals of Mathematics an article that he called “Non-cooperative Games” where he explained important points of his thesis, which he presented the following year at Princeton. The document explained the elementary points about the strategies and the possibilities of predicting the behavior that occurs in non-cooperative games with little information. Forbes also defined the Nash equilibrium, which referred to a solution concept for games with two or more players, in which he assumed that each player knows and has adopted his best strategy and that everyone knows the strategies of the others.

After finishing his work, he entered to work with the RAND, an institution of the Air Force of the United States that was dedicated to strategic research, which was interested in John Forbes applying his knowledge on game theory in the military strategy that they drove.

For the year 1952, he joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he made a recognized research on multiple real algebraic variables. Two years later, he was arrested during a police crackdown on homosexuals.

In 1957, John Forbes Nash married Alicia Lardé López Harrison, a former student of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Between April and May of the year 1959, he was admitted to the McLean Hospital, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

For the year 1961, he was taken to the Psychiatric Hospital of Trenton in New Jersey. The following 9 months he was in several psychiatric hospitals, where he was treated with antipsychotic drugs and shock therapies with insulin.

Since 1970, he did not go back to psychiatric hospitals, since he did not want to consume more drugs, stating that he used them against his will.

After long treatments in psychiatric, in the 1990s he managed to control his disease, so he returned to scientific research activity. He carried out several works related to differential equations and their analytical resolution through numerical methods, which had a great impact on the international scientific community.

For the year 1994, John Forbes Nash won the Nobel Prize in Economics, thanks to his research work in game theory.

In the year 1998, Sylvia Nasar published the novel “A Beautiful Mind” which told the life of John Forbes Nash; for the year 2001, the film of the same novel was released.

John Forbes Nash died with his wife on May 23, 2015, at age 82, in a car accident after receiving the Abel Award.

 

AWARDS

• The John von Neumann Theory Award for his fundamental theoretical contributions to operational research: 1978.
• Nobel Prize in Economics for his analysis of the balance in the Theory of Non-Cooperative Games: 1994.
• Leroy P. Steele Award from the American Mathematical Society, for his fundamental contribution to mathematical research.
• Medal of the Double Helix of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory for its work defending the rights of the mentally ill: 2010.
• Abel Prize, for his work in partial differential equations: 2015.