Nobel laureate, Mathematician John F Nash Jr, Dies at 86

mangaloretoday.com

New Jersey, USA, May 24: John F. Nash Jr., a mathematician who shared a Nobel Prize in 1994 for work that greatly extended the reach and power of modern economic theory and whose decades long descent into severe mental illness and eventual recovery were the subject of a book and a 2001 film, both titled "A Beautiful Mind," was killed, along with his wife, in a car crash on Saturday in New Jersey. He was 86.

 

Nash and his wife, Alicia, 82, were in a taxi on the New Jersey Turnpike when the driver lost control while trying to pass another car and hit a guardrail and another vehicle, said Sgt. Gregory Williams of the New Jersey State Police.

The couple were ejected from the cab and pronounced dead at the scene. The taxi driver and the driver of the other car were treated for non-life threatening injuries. No criminal charges have been filed.

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 few others dared tackle them. A one-sentence letter written in support of his application to Princeton’s doctoral program in math said simply, "This man is a genius."

"John’s remarkable achievements inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and scientists,’’ the president of Princeton, Christopher L. Eisgruber, said, "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 Nash in "A Beautiful Mind," tweeted that he was "stunned," by his death. "An amazing partnership," he wrote. "Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts."

Nash’s theory of noncooperative games, published in 1950 and known as Nash equilibrium, provided a conceptually simple but powerful mathematical tool for analyzing a wide range of competitive situations, from corporate rivalries to legislative decision making. Nash’s approach is now pervasive in economics and throughout the social sciences and is applied routinely in other fields, like evolutionary biology.

Harold W. Kuhn, an emeritus professor of mathematics at Princeton and a longtime friend and colleague of Nash’s who died in 2014, 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."

An economist, Roger Myerson of the University of Chicago, went further, comparing the impact of Nash equilibrium on economics "to that of the discovery of the DNA double helix in the biological sciences."

Nash also made contributions to pure mathematics that many mathematicians view as more significant than his Nobel-winning work on game theory, including solving 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 contained in a small handful of papers published before he was 30.

"Jane Austen wrote six novels, Bach wrote six partitas," said Barry Mazur, a professor of mathematics at Harvard who was a freshman at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology when Nash taught there. "I think Nash’s 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."

Yet to a wider audience, Nash was probably best known for his life story, a tale of dazzling achievement, devastating loss and almost miraculous redemption. The narrative of Nash’s brilliant rise, the lost years when his world dissolved in schizophrenia, his return to rationality and the awarding of the Nobel, retold in a biography by Sylvia Nasar and in the Oscar-winning film, captured the public mind and became a symbol of the destructive force of mental illness and the stigma that often hounds those who suffer from it.

John Forbes Nash was born on June 13, 1928, in Bluefield, West Virginia. His father, John Sr., was an electrical engineer. His mother, Margaret, was a schoolteacher.

As a child, John Nash may have been a prodigy, but he was not a sterling student, 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. Bell’s book, "Men of Mathematics," and soon demonstrated his own mathematical skill by independently proving Fermat’s classic 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 (then called Carnegie Institute of Technology). But he chafed at the regimented courses, and encouraged by professors who recognized his mathematical genius, he switched to mathematics.

Receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Carnegie, he arrived at Princeton in 1948, 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.

Nash, tall and good-looking, quickly became known for his intellectual arrogance, his odd habits - he paced the halls, walked off in the middle of conversations, whistled incessantly - and his fierce ambition, his colleagues 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 Bros. as Hex.) He also took on a problem left unsolved by von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, the pioneers of game theory, in their now classic book, "Theory of Games and Economic Behavior."