Life part 1

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.