Joh Nash

Introduction:

John Forbes Nash Jr. was born June 13, 1928 he is an American mathematician who works in game theory and differential geometry. He shared the 1994 Nobel prize in Economics with two other game theorists, Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi. He is best known in popular culture as the subject of the Hollywood movie, A Beautiful Mind, about his mathematical genius and his struggles with mental illness.

Childhood/Adolence:

On June 13, 1928, John Forbes Nash was born in the small Appalachian town of Bluefield, West Virginia, the son of John Nash Sr., an electrical engineer, and Virginia Martin, a teacher. At 12, he was carrying out scientific experiments in his room at home. John at a young age didn't like working with other people, preferring to do things alone. Instead of being social with his classmates he instead exhanged it for intellectual superiority, and he believed that dances and sports to be a distraction from experiments and studies. Martha, his sister, seems to have been a remarkably normal child while John seemed different from other children.By the time he was in highdchool he was reading the classic " Men Of Mathematics" by E.T. He also did electrical and chemistry experiments at the time. In his senior year of high school, John won a coveted Westinghouse scholarship, one of only ten awarded in the nation. He went to the Carnegie Institute of Technology and, in 1948, graduated with a Master's degree after only three years. Although he had originally planned to study chemical engineering, he quickly discovered a love for mathematics and changed his major. His advisor wrote a recommendation for him saying "This man is a genius".

He took the William Lowell Putnam Mathematics Competition twice but, although he did well, he did not make the top five. It was a failure in Nash's eyes and one which he took badly. The Putnam Mathematics Competition was not the only thing going badly for Nash. Although his mathematics professors heaped praise on him, his fellow students found him a very strange person. Physically he was strong and this saved him from being bullied, but his fellow students took delight in making fun of Nash who they saw as an awkward immature person displaying childish tantrums. He showed homosexual tendencies, climbing into bed with the other boys who reacted by making fun of the fact that he was attracted to boys and humiliated him. They played cruel pranks on him and he reacted by asking his fellow students to challenge him with mathematics problems. He ended up doing the homework of many of the students. When he graduated he had been ofered fellowships to enter as a graduate at either Harvard or Princeton. But he picked Princton because Princton seemed more intersested in getting him to go there.

Adulthood:

In September 1948 Nash entered Princeton where he showed an interest in a broad range of pure mathematics: topology, algebraic geometry, game theory and logic were his major interests but he did seem to have avoided attending lectures. His major accomplishment during his time at Princeton was to develop his theory of "Nash Equilibrium", which applied to Game Theory. Prior to his theory, it was thought that in game theory and competition, everyone fought for their own interests. He developed the idea that for each player in a game, there is an ideal solution with regard to the other players' actions. Although the potential of the theory was not realized then, it gained notoriety over the next several decades.

John rarely attended class, insisting that it would ruin his originality. He constantly looked for ways to establish himself in the field of mathematics in order to become the world's greatest mathematician. He constantly walked through the hallways whistling Bach's "Little Fugue" and rode his bicycle in a figure-eight or infinity symbol in the quadrangle on campus.

After he graduated with his Ph.D, John moved to Boston, where he became a distinguished member of the faculty at the Massachusetts

Institute of Technology. He was called the "kid professor" by students since he was so young, but he considered himself incredibly elite. His colleagues there were annoyed by his arrogance, but tolerated it because of his genius. He quickly began making huge discoveries in mathematics in fields such as geometry and partial differential equations. In 1958, he was featured in Fortune Magazine as one of the brightest stars in the field of mathematics. However, he still considered himself a failure since he had not yet achieved the Field's medal, the highest award in mathematics.

In 1949, while studying for his doctorate, he wrote a paper which 45 years later was to win a Nobel prize for economics. During this period Nash established the mathematical principles of game theory. He had ideas and was very sure they were important. He went to see Einstein not long after he arrived in Princeton and told him about an idea he had regarding gravity. After explaining complicated mathematics to Einstein for about an hour, Einstein advised him to go and learn more physics. Apparently a physicist did publish a similar idea some years later.

In 1950 Nash received his doctorate from Princeton with a thesis entitled Non-cooperative Games. In the summer of that year he worked for the RAND Corporation where his work on game theory made him a leading expert on the Cold War conflict which dominated RAND's work. He worked there from a couple of years as the Corporation tried to apply game theory to military and diplomatic