John Nash

John Nash

John Nash is an American mathematician who works in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations. He was born June 3rd, 1928, in Bluefield, WV and struggles with schizophrenia. A Hollywood movie; A Beautiful Mind, was made about his life. He shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics, along with two other game theorists.

When he was 12 he was doing science experiments in his room. John loved to read. He also had a job at The Bluefield Telegraph. At a young age it was obvious that he preferred to be alone rather than being social with other people. He was socially rejected by his classmates and was the object of many practical jokes. John believed that extracurricular activities like dances and sports were a distraction from his experiments and studies.

While still in high school, he attended classes at Bluefield College. After high school, his goal was to attend Harvard University because of their prestigious math program. Though he was accepted, he went to Princeton University because was aggressively persuaded by the chairman of the university. He was convinced that Harvard valued him less than Princeton would. While he was at Princeton he worked on his Equilibrium Theory that would later be called Nash Equilibrium.

In 1951 he went to MIT to be an instructor to the Mathematics Faculty where he met Alicia Lopez-Harrison, a physics student from El Salvador, whom he married in Feburary 1957. Alicia put Nash in a mental hospital in 1959 for schizophrenia. Their son, John Charles Martin Nash, was born soon afterwards, but remained nameless for a year because his mother felt that her husband should have a say in the name. Nash and Lopez-Harrison divorced in 1963, but reunited in 1970, in a nonromantic relationship that resembled two unrelated roommates. Alicia referred to him as her "boarder" and said they lived "like two distantly