In 1948, in Nash's application to Princeton’s mathematics department, Nash's advisor and former Carnegie Tech professor R.J. Duffin wrote a letter of recommendation consisting of a single sentence: ¨This man is a genius¨. Though accepted by Harvard University, which had been his first choice because of what he perceived to be the institution's greater prestige and superior mathematics faculty, he was aggressively pursued by then chairman of the mathematics department at Princeton University, Solomon Lefschetz, whose offer of the John S. Kennedy fellowship was enough to convince him that Harvard valued him less. Thus, from White Oak he went to Princeton Univeristy, where he worked on his equilibrium theory (Nash equilibrium). He earned a doctorate in 1950 with a dissertation on non-cooperative games.The thesis, which was written under the supervision of Albert W. Tusker, contained the definition and properties of what would later be called the "Nash equilibrium". These studies led to four articles:
¨Equilibriun Points In N-Person Games¨,Proceedings Of The NationalAcademy Of Sciences (1950),
"Non-cooperative Games", Annals of Mathematics (1951)
Nash also did important work in the area of algebraic geometry:
"Real algebraic manifolds", Annals of Mathematics.
His most famous work in pure mathematics was the Nash embedding theorem, which showed that any abstract Riemannian manifold can be isometrically realized as a submanifold of Euclideam space. He also made contributions to the theory of nonlinear parabolic partial differential equations.
Nash was born and raised in Bluefield, West Virginia. He was born to electrical engineer John Forbes Nash and his wife Margaret Virginia Martin, an English and Latin teacher. On November 16, 1930 his sister Martha Nash was born. He was an avid reader of Compton`s Pictured Encyclopedia, Life Magazine, and Time Magazine. Later he had a job at the Bluefield Daily Telegraph.
At age thirteen, he carried out scientific experiments in his room. He returned the social rejection of his classmates with practical jokes and intellectual superiority, believing their dances and sports to be a distraction from his experiments and studies.
Martha, his younger sister, wrote that "Johnny was always different. [My parents] knew he was different. And they knew he was bright. He always wanted to do things his way. Mother insisted I do things for him, that I include him in my friendships... but I wasn't too keen on showing off my somewhat odd brother."[3]
In his autobiography, Nash notes that it was E.T. Bell's book, Men of Mathematics, in particular, the essay on Fermat that first sparked his interest in mathematics. He attended classes at Bluefield College while still in high school at Bluefield High School. After graduating from high school in 1945, he enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on a Westinghouse scholarship, where he studied first chemical engineering and later chemistry before switching to mathematics. He received both his bachelor`s degree and his master`s degree in 1948 while at Carnegie Tech.
Nash also created two popular games: Hex in 1947 (independently created first in 1942 by Piet Hein), and So Long Sucker in 1950 with M. Hausner and Lloyd S. Shapley.
After graduation, Nash took a summer job in White Oak, Maryland, working on a Navy research project being run by Clifford Truesdell.
Forbes Nash, Jr. (born June 13, 1928), is an American mathematician and economist whose works in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations provided insight into the forces that govern chance and events inside complex systems in daily life. His theories are still used today in market economics, computing, accounting and military theory. Serving as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton University during the later part of his life, he shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi.
Nash is also the subject of the movie, A Beautiful Mind, which was nominated for eight Oscars (winning four). The film was based on the biography of the same name, and focuses on Nash's mathematical genius and his struggle with schizophrenia.
