John F. Nash Jr.

, Math Genius Defined by a Beautiful Mind, Dies at 86

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/science/john-nash-a-beautiful-mind-subjectand-nobel-winner-dies-at-86.html

John F. Nash Jr., a mathematician who shared a Nobel in 1994 for work that
greatly extended the reach and power of modern economic theory and whose
long descent into severe mental illness and eventual recovery were the subject
of a book and a film, both titled A Beautiful Mind, was killed, along with his
wife, in a car crash on Saturday in New Jersey. He was 86.
r. Nash and his wife, Alicia, 82, were in a taxi on the New Jersey Turnpike in
Monroe Township around 4:30 p.m. when the driver lost control while
veering from the left lane to the right and hit a guardrail and another car, Sgt.
Gregory Williams of the New Jersey State Police said.
The couple were ejected from the cab and pronounced dead at the scene. The
State Police said it appeared that they had not been wearing seatbelts. The
taxi driver and the driver of the other car were treated for injuries. No
criminal charges had been filed on Sunday.
The Nashes were returning home from the airport after a trip to Norway,
where Dr. Nash and Louis Nirenberg, a mathematician from New York
University, had received the Abel Prize from the Norwegian Academy of
Science and Letters.
Dr. Nash was widely regarded as one of the great mathematicians of the 20th
century, known for the originality of his thinking and for his fearlessness in
wrestling down problems so difficult that few others dared tackle them. A
one-sentence letter written in support of his application to Princetons
doctoral program in math said simply, This man is a genius.
Johns remarkable achievements inspired generations of mathematicians,
economists and scientists, the president of Princeton, Christopher L.
Eisgruber, said on Sunday, and the story of his life with Alicia moved
millions of readers and moviegoers, who marveled at their courage in the face
of daunting challenges.
Russell Crowe, who portrayed Dr. Nash in the 2001 film adaptation of A
Beautiful Mind, posted on Twitter that he was stunned by the deaths. An
amazing partnership, he wrote. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts.
Dr. Nashs theory of noncooperative games, published in 1950 and known as
Nash equilibrium, provided a conceptually simple but powerful mathematical

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tool for analyzing a wide range of competitive situations, from corporate

rivalries to legislative decision-making. Dr. Nashs approach is now pervasive
in economics and throughout the social sciences and applied in other fields as
well, including evolutionary biology.
Harold W. Kuhn, an emeritus professor of mathematics at Princeton and a
longtime friend and colleague of Dr. Nashs who died in 2014, once said, I
think honestly that there have been really not that many great ideas in the
20th century in economics, and maybe, among the top 10, his equilibrium
would be among them. A University of Chicago economist, Roger Myerson,
went further, comparing the impact of the Nash equilibrium on economics to
that of the discovery of the DNA double helix in the biological sciences.
Dr. Nash also made contributions to pure mathematics that many
mathematicians view as more significant than his Nobel-winning work on
game theory. In one he solved an intractable problem in differential geometry
derived from the work of the 19th century mathematician G. F. B. Riemann.
His achievements were the more remarkable, colleagues said, for being
presented in papers published before he was 30.
Jane Austen wrote six novels, said Barry Mazur, a professor of mathematics
at Harvard who was a freshman at M.I.T. when Dr. Nash taught there. I
think Nashs pure mathematical contributions are on that level. Very, very
few papers he wrote on different subjects, but the ones that had impact had
incredible impact.
To a wider audience Dr. Nash was probably best known for his life story, one
of dazzling achievement, devastating loss and almost miraculous redemption.
The tale of Dr. Nashs brilliant rise, the years lost to schizophrenia, his return
to rationality and his receiving the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic
Sciences retold in a biography by Sylvia Nasar and in the Oscar-winning
film, which also starred Jennifer Connelly as Alicia Nash captured the
public mind as a portrait of the destructive force of mental illness and the
stigma that can hound those who suffer from it.
Arrogant, Ambitious and Odd

John F. Nash Jr., Math Genius Defined by a Beautiful Mind, Dies at 86

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John Forbes Nash was born on June 13, 1928, in Bluefield, W.Va. His father,
John Sr., was an electrical engineer. His mother, Margaret, was a Latin
teacher.
As a child, John Nash may have been a prodigy, but he was not a sterling
student, Ms. Nasar noted in a 1994 article in The New York Times. He read
constantly. He played chess. He whistled entire Bach melodies, she wrote.
In high school he stumbled across E. T. Bells book Men of Mathematics,
and soon demonstrated his own mathematical skill by independently proving
a classic Fermat theorem, an accomplishment he recalled in an
autobiographical essay written for the Nobel committee.
Intending to become an engineer like his father, he entered Carnegie Mellon
University (then called Carnegie Institute of Technology) in Pittsburgh. But
he chafed at the regimentation of the coursework and switched to
mathematics, encouraged by professors who recognized his mathematical
genius.
Receiving his bachelors and masters degrees from Carnegie, he arrived at
Princeton in 1948. It was a time of great expectations, when American
children still dreamed of growing up to be physicists like Einstein or
mathematicians like the brilliant Hungarian-born polymath John von
Neumann, both of whom attended the afternoon teas at Fine Hall, the home
of the math department.

John Nash, tall and good-looking, became known for his intellectual
arrogance, his odd habits he paced the halls, walked off in the middle
of conversations and whistled incessantly and his fierce ambition, his
colleagues have recalled.
He invented a game, known as Nash, that became an obsession in the Fine
Hall common room. (The same game, invented independently in Denmark,
was later sold by Parker Brothers as Hex.) He also took on a problem left
unsolved by Dr. von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, the pioneers of game
theory, in their now-classic book, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior.
Dr. von Neumann and Dr. Morgenstern, an economist at Princeton, primarily
addressed so-called zero-sum games, in which one players gain is anothers
loss. But most real-world interactions are more complicated; players
interests are not directly opposed, and there are opportunities for mutual

John F. Nash Jr., Math Genius Defined by a Beautiful Mind, Dies at 86

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gain. Dr. Nashs solution, contained in a 27-page doctoral thesis he wrote

when he was 21, provided a way of predicting the possible outcome of a game
with multiple players, in which each was acting to maximize self-interest.
This deceptively simple extension of game theory paved the way for economic
theory to be applied to an array of situations besides the marketplace.
It was a very natural discovery, Dr. Kuhn said. A variety of people would
have come to the same results at the same time, but John did it and he did it
on his own.
Brilliance Turns Malignant
After receiving his doctorate at Princeton, Dr. Nash worked as a consultant to
the RAND Corporation and as an instructor at M.I.T. while continuing to
attack problems that no one else could solve. On a dare, he developed an
entirely original approach to a longstanding problem in differential geometry,
showing that abstract geometric spaces called Riemannian manifolds could
be squished into arbitrarily small pieces of Euclidean space.
As his career flourished and his reputation grew, however, Dr. Nashs
personal life became increasingly complex. A turbulent romance in Boston
with a nurse, Eleanor Stier, resulted in the birth of a son, John David Stier, in
1953. Dr. Nash also had a series of relationships with men, and while at
RAND in the summer of 1954 he was arrested in a mens bathroom for
indecent exposure, according to Ms. Nasars biography. And doubts about his
accomplishments gnawed at him: Two of mathematics highest honors, the
Putnam Competition and the Fields Medal, had eluded him.
In 1957, after two years of on-and-off courtship, he married Alicia Larde, an
M.I.T. physics major from an aristocratic Central American family and one of
only 16 women in the class of 1955.
He was very, very good looking, very intelligent, Ms. Nash told Ms. Nasar.
It was a little bit of a hero-worship thing.
But early in 1959, with his wife pregnant with their son, John, Dr. Nash began
to unravel. His brilliance turned malignant, leading him into a landscape of
paranoia and delusion, and in April he was hospitalized at McLean Hospital,
outside Boston, sharing the psychiatric ward with, among others, the poet
Robert Lowell.
It was the first step of a steep decline. There were more hospitalizations. Dr.
Nash was injected with insulin and fled for a while to Europe, sending cryptic
postcards to colleagues and family members. For many years he roamed the
Princeton campus, a lonely figure scribbling unintelligible formulas on the

John F. Nash Jr., Math Genius Defined by a Beautiful Mind, Dies at 86

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same blackboards in Fine Hall on which he had once demonstrated startling

mathematical feats.
Though game theory was gaining in prominence, and his work cited ever
more frequently and taught widely in economics courses around the world,
Dr. Nash had vanished from the professional world.
He hadnt published a scientific paper since 1958, Ms. Nasar wrote in the
1994 Times article. He hadnt held an academic post since 1959. Many
people had heard, incorrectly, that he had had a lobotomy. Others, mainly
those outside of Princeton, simply assumed that he was dead.
Indeed, Dr. Myerson recalled in a telephone interview that one scholar who
wrote to Dr. Nash in the 1980s to ask permission to reprint an article received
the letter back with one sentence scrawled across it: You may use my article
as if I were dead.
Reaching a Watershed
Still, Dr. Nash was fortunate in having family members, colleagues and
friends who protected him, got him work and in general helped him survive.
Ms. Nash divorced him in 1963, but continued to stand by him, taking him
into her house to live in 1970. (The couple married a second time in 2001.)
Ms. Nash supported her ex-husband and her son by working as a computer
programmer, with some financial help from family, friends and colleagues.
By the early 1990s, when the Nobel committee began investigating the
possibility of awarding Dr. Nash its memorial prize in economics, his illness
had quieted. He later said that he had simply decided that he was going to
return to rationality. I emerged from irrational thinking, ultimately, without
medicine other than the natural hormonal changes of aging, he wrote in an
email to Dr. Kuhn in 1996.
Colleagues, including Dr. Kuhn, helped persuade the Nobel committee that
Dr. Nash was well enough to accept the prize he shared it with two
economists, John C. Harsanyi of the University of California at Berkeley,
and Reinhard Selten of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University in
Bonn, Germany and they defended him when some questioned giving the
prize to a man who had suffered from a serious mental disorder.
The Nobel, the publicity that attended it and the making of the film were a
watershed in his life, Dr. Kuhn said of Dr. Nash. It changed him from a
homeless unknown person who was wandering around Princeton to a
celebrity, and financially it put him on a much better basis.

John F. Nash Jr., Math Genius Defined by a Beautiful Mind, Dies at 86

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Dr. Nash is survived by his sons, John David Stier and John Charles Martin
Nash, and a sister, Martha Nash Legg.
He continued to work, traveling and speaking at conferences and trying to
formulate a new theory of cooperative games. Friends described him as
charming and diffident, socially awkward, a little quiet, with scant trace of the
arrogance of his youth.
You dont find many mathematicians approaching things this way now,
barehandedly attacking a problem, the way Dr. Nash did, Dr. Mazur said.
Correction: May 24, 2015
An earlier version of this obituary misidentified the poet with whom Dr. Nash spent
time in the psychiatric ward at McLean Hospital. It was Robert Lowell, not Ezra
Pound. Because of an editing error, the earlier version also misstated the title of a book
by E.T. Bell. It is Men of Mathematics, not Men and Mathematics.
Correction: June 12, 2015
An obituary on May 25 about the mathematician John Nash referred incorrectly to
treatment he received during one of his hospitalizations. He received insulin shock
therapy, not electroshock therapy. The obituary also described imprecisely the book
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, by John von Neumann and Oskar
Morgenstern, which included a problem that Dr. Nash solved. That book primarily
addressed so-called zero-sum games; it did not solely address such games. And
because of an editing error, the obituary misidentified the prize Dr. Nash shared in
1994. It was the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, not the Nobel Prize.
Michael Schwirtz and Ashley Southall contributed reporting.

Explaining a Cornerstone of Game Theory: John Nashs Equilibrium

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John F. Nash Jr. was best known for advances in game theory, which is
essentially the study of how to come up with a winning strategy in the game of
life especially when you do not know what your competitors are doing and
the choices do not always look promising.

John F. Nash Jr., Math Genius Defined by a Beautiful Mind, Dies at 86

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Dr. Nash did not invent game theory; the mathematician John von Neumann
did the pioneering work to establish the field in the first half of the 20th
century. But Dr. Nash extended the analysis beyond zero-sum, I-win-you-lose
types of games to more complex situations in which all of the players could
gain, or all could lose.
The central concept is the Nash equilibrium, roughly defined as a stable state
in which no player can gain advantage through a unilateral change of strategy
assuming the others do not change what they are doing.
The film A Beautiful Mind, based on Dr. Nashs life, tries to explain game
theory in a scene in which Russell Crowe, playing Dr. Nash, is at a bar with
three friends, and they are all enraptured by a beautiful blond woman who
walks in with four brunette friends.
While his friends banter about which of them would successfully woo the
blonde, Dr. Nash concludes they should do the opposite: Ignore her. If we all
go for the blonde, he says, we block each other and not a single one of us is
going to get her. So then we go for her friends, but they will all give us the
cold shoulder because nobody likes to be second choice. But what if no one
goes to the blonde? We dont get in each others way and we dont insult the
other girls. Thats the only way we win.
While this never-happened-in-real-life episode illustrates some of the
machinations that game theorists consider, it is not an example of a Nash
equilibrium.
A simpler example is what is known as the Prisoners Dilemma. Two
conspirators in a crime are arrested and offered a deal: If you confess and
testify against your accomplice, well let you off and throw the book at the
other guy 10 years in prison.
If both stay quiet, the prosecutors cannot prove the more serious charges and
both would spend just a year behind bars for lesser crimes. If both confess,
the prosecutors would not need their testimony, and both would get eightyear prison sentences.
At first glance, keeping quiet might seem the best strategy. If both did so,
both would get off fairly lightly.
But the calculation of the Nash equilibrium shows they would likely both
confess.
This type of problem is called a noncooperative game, which means the two
prisoners cannot convey intentions to each other. Without knowing what the
other prisoner is doing, each is faced with this choice: If he confesses, he

John F. Nash Jr., Math Genius Defined by a Beautiful Mind, Dies at 86

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could end up with freedom or eight years in prison. If he stays quiet, he goes
to prison for one year or 10 years.
In that light, confessing is the better option. And he knows that the other
prisoner has the same incentive to confess, so it is less likely he would stay
quiet.
Further, changing strategy to staying mum would be a bad move longer
prison term unless the other prisoner somehow also decided to do that.
Without any communication, that would be a highly risky guess, and thus,
this strategy represents a Nash equilibrium.
The bar scene, however, does not. With four men chasing four brunettes, any
of the men could be tempted to chase the blonde instead, a more desirable
outcome if his friends did not also change strategy.
The Wisdom of a Beautiful Mind
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John F. Nash Jr., who died in a car crash on Saturday at age 86, was celebrated for the
originality of his thinking and his contributions to game theory and pure mathematics.
But he became perhaps most widely known because of his struggle with mental illness,
an experience portrayed in the book and film A Beautiful Mind. Though he often said
he had regained his health by simply rejecting irrational thought, these collected
remarks reveal a profound understanding that his irrational thought could not be
separated from the mathematical ability for which he was acclaimed.
1. Even when I was mentally disturbed, I had a lot of interest in
numbers. I began to think more scientifically as to the years like the
80s, and maybe the later 70s. And so theres a transition from really
having more of an enthusiasm for the numbers, like maybe magical
or representing a divine revelation, and just a more scientific
appreciation of numbers, and these are not necessarily entirely far
apart.

From the PBS American Experience documentary A Brilliant Madness.

John F. Nash Jr., Math Genius Defined by a Beautiful Mind, Dies at 86

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2. The ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way
that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.

From A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar.

3. I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between

mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great
mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium and
symptoms of schizophrenia.

From The Riemann Hypothesis: The Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics,

by Karl Sabbagh.

4. I can see theres a connection between not following normal

thinking and doing creative thinking. I wouldnt have had good
scientific ideas if I had thought more normally.

From Glimpsing Inside a Beautiful Mind, The Irish Times.

5. I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is

characteristic of scientists. However this is not entirely a matter of
joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical
health. One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a
limit on a persons concept of his relation to the cosmos.

From Les Prix Nobel: The Nobel Prizes 1994, edited by Tore Frangsmyr.

6. Statistically, it would seem improbable that any mathematician or

scientist, at the age of 66, would be able through continued research
efforts, to add much to his or her previous achievements. However I
am still making the effort and it is conceivable that with the gap

John F. Nash Jr., Math Genius Defined by a Beautiful Mind, Dies at 86

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period of about 25 years of partially deluded thinking providing a

sort of vacation my situation may be atypical. Thus I have hopes of
being able to achieve something of value through my current studies
or with any new ideas that come in the future.
From Les Prix Nobel: The Nobel Prizes 1994, edited by Tore Frangsmyr.