Nash John

American mathematician and Nobel Prize winner 1994. In his acceptance speech, Nash said, "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 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." Nash himself associated his madness with living on an "ultralogical" plane, "breathing air too rare" for most mortals, and if being "cured" meant he could no longer do any original work at that level, then, Nash argued, a remission might not be worthwhile in the end. Johnny Nash, as he was called by his family, was a solitary and introverted little boy though his parents were loving and attentive. He was named for his dad, who was an electrical engineer and schoolteacher, a veteran of WW I. When Johnny was two years old, his sister Martha was born (11/16/1930). The household had books available, including an encyclopedia in which the boy was more interested than in playing with other kids. His mom encouraged his studies but his teachers labeled him as "backwards" due to his lack of social skills. By the time he was about 12, he was showing more interest in his science experiments at home than in his boring school work. His math interest began at about 14 and by high school, he noted that he "succeeding in proving the classic Fermat theorem about an integer multiplied by itself p times where p is a prime." He was also doing electrical and chemistry experiments. He entered Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh with a major of chemical engineering, shifting to chemistry and then to math. Nash received a BA and an MA in mathematics in 1948. His graduate studies, beginning in September 1948, were in Princeton, where he became interested in game theory studies, which had been stimulated by the work of von Neumann and Morgenstern. In 1949, while studying for his doctorate, he wrote a paper which 45 years later was to win a Nobel Prize for economics. In 1950 Nash received his doctorate from Princeton with a thesis entitled Non-cooperative Games. He was on the math faculty at M.I.T. from 1951 until he resigned in the spring of 1959, interspaced with assignments in the private sector. During his time at MIT Nash began to have personal problems with his life, added to his customary social indifference. He met Eleanor Stier and they had a son, John David Stier, born on 6/19/1953. Eleanor wanted to get married but Nash refused to consider it. In the summer of 1954, while working for RAND, he was arrested in a police operation to trap homosexuals. He was dismissed from RAND. One of Nashs students at MIT, Alicia Larde, became friendly with him and by the summer of 1955 they were seeing each other regularly. In 1956 Nashs parents found out that he had an affair with Eleanor and a son. Nashs father died soon after and Nash may have blamed himself for contributing a shock to his family. In February of 1957 Nash married Alicia; by the autumn of 1958 she was pregnant but, a couple of months later, near the end of 1958 or early 1959, Nashs mental state became very disturbed. At the threshold of his career, he was struck by paranoid schizophrenia. He lost hi Read less