John F. Nash Jr., Mathematician Whose Life Story Inspired ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ Dies at 86
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 2001 film, “A Beautiful Mind,” was killed in a car crash Saturday in New Jersey. He was 86.
Dr. Nash, and his wife, Alicia, 82, were killed when the taxi they were riding in lost control and hit a guard rail and another vehicle, said Sgt. Gregory Williams of the New Jersey State Police.
Sergeant Williams said the taxi was traveling southbound on the New Jersey Turnpike when the driver lost control while attempting to pass another vehicle. Dr. and Ms. Nash were ejected from the vehicle and pronounced dead at the scene. The taxi driver and the driver of the other car were treated for non-life threatening injuries. There are no criminal charges at this time.
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 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.”
His 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. Dr. 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 Dr. 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.”
Dr. 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 M.I.T. when Dr. 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.”
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/s...nspired-a-beautiful-mind-dies-at-86.html?_r=0
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 2001 film, “A Beautiful Mind,” was killed in a car crash Saturday in New Jersey. He was 86.
Dr. Nash, and his wife, Alicia, 82, were killed when the taxi they were riding in lost control and hit a guard rail and another vehicle, said Sgt. Gregory Williams of the New Jersey State Police.
Sergeant Williams said the taxi was traveling southbound on the New Jersey Turnpike when the driver lost control while attempting to pass another vehicle. Dr. and Ms. Nash were ejected from the vehicle and pronounced dead at the scene. The taxi driver and the driver of the other car were treated for non-life threatening injuries. There are no criminal charges at this time.
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 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.”
His 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. Dr. 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 Dr. 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.”
Dr. 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 M.I.T. when Dr. 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.”
More:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/s...nspired-a-beautiful-mind-dies-at-86.html?_r=0
