When mathematician John Nash received a Nobel Prize
for economics in 1994, there was a certain tragedy to the award. He hadn't
published a scientific paper or held an academic post in nearly 40 years, according to a New York Times article from that year.
Nash died Saturday with his wife, Alicia, following a taxi accident on the New Jersey Turnpike.
He will likely be best remembered from Sylvia Nasar's bestselling 1998
biography titled "A Beautiful Mind" and the 2001 Academy Award
for best picture winner of the same name, both of which documented a battle
with paranoid schizophrenia that kept Nash out of academia for decades.
"For the better part of 20 years, his once
supremely rational mind was beset by delusions and hallucinations," The Washington Post notes in their obituary of Nash.
"By the time Dr. Nash emerged from his disturbed state, his ideas had influenced
economics, foreign affairs, politics, biology — virtually every sphere of life
fueled by competition."
When he won the Nobel, Nasar reported in The Times in
1994, Nash "was being honored for a slender 27-page Ph.D. thesis written
almost half a century ago at the tender age of 21." Before the award was
announced, many scholars assumed he was dead.
Written while a graduate student at Princeton
University, Nash's thesis would spawn what became known as the "Nash
equilibrium," a central tenet of game theory. As a student and later a
professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nash became known for
approaching problems in a way no one else could.
"His graduate professor, R.J. Duffin, recalls
Nash as a tall, slightly awkward student who came to him one day and described
a problem he thought he had solved. Duffin realized with some astonishment that
Nash, without knowing it, had independently proved Brouwer's famed
theorem," Nasar wrote in 1994. "The professor's letter of recommendation
for Nash had just one line: 'This man is a genius.'"
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