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John Forbes Nash Jr. (born June 13, 1928) is an
United States|American mathematician who works in
game theory and differential geometry.  He shared
the 1994 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences
with two other game theorists, Reinhard Selten and
John Harsanyi. 

After a promising start to his mathematical
career, Nash began to suffer from schizophrenia
around the age of 29, an illness from which he
recovered some thirty years later.

==Education==
From June 1945-June 1948 Nash studied at the
Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh
(now Carnegie Mellon University), intending to
become an engineer like his father.  Instead, he
developed a deep love for mathematics and what
became a lifelong interest in subjects such as
number theory, Diophantine equation|Diophantine
equations, quantum mechanics and relativity
theory.  

He loved solving problems.  At Carnegie he became
interested in the 'negotiation problem', which
John von Neumann had left unsolved in his book The
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1944), and
participated in the game theory group there. His
theory, now called the Nash equilibrium, is an
extension of the Minimax|minimax theorem stated
earlier by John Von Neumann in 1928.

From Pittsburgh he went to Princeton University
where he worked on his equilibrium theory.  He
received a Doctor of Philosophy|Ph.D. in 1950 with
a dissertation on non-cooperative games.  The
thesis, which was written under the supervision of
Albert Tucker, contained the definition and
properties of what would later be called the Nash
equilibrium. His studies on this subject led to
three articles:
* 'Equilibrium Points in N-person Games',
published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences (USA) (1950);
* The Bargaining Problem (April 1950) in
Econometrica, and
* Two-person Cooperative Games (January 1953),
also in Econometrica.

==Personal life==

John 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. By the time he was about twelve years
old he was showing great interest in carrying out
scientific experiments in his room at home.

Martha, his sister, seems to have been a
remarkably normal child while Johnny seemed
different from other children. She wrote later in
life, "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". 

At Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he met
Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Lardé, a math student
from El Salvador, whom he married in February
1957. Their son, John Charles Martin Nash|John
Charles Martin (b. 1959), remained nameless for a
year because Alicia, having just committed Nash to
a mental hospital, felt that he should have a say
in what to name the baby.  John became a
mathematician, but, like his father, he was
diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic. Nash had
another son, John David (b. June 19, 1953), by
Eleanor Stier, but refused to have anything to do
with them. Sylvia Nasar, Nash's biographer, cites
evidence that Nash was bisexual. However, John and
Alicia denied such on 60 Minutes in 2002.

Although she divorced him in 1963, Alicia took him
back in 1970. According to Sylvia Nasar's
biography of Nash, Alicia referred to him as her
"boarder," and they lived "like two distantly
related individuals under one roof" until he won
the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in
Memory of Alfred Nobel|Bank of Sweden Prize in
Economic Sciences in 1994, when they renewed their
relationship. They remarried on June 1, 2001.

===Schizophrenia===

In 1958, Nash began to show the first signs of his
mental illness.  He became paranoid and was
admitted into the McLean Hospital, April-May 1959,
where he was diagnosed with 'paranoia|paranoid
schizophrenia'.  After a problematic stay in Paris
and Geneva, Nash returned to Princeton in 1960. 
He remained in and out of mental hospitals until
1970, undergoing various treatments including
insulin (a.k.a. Hypoglycemia|hypoglycemic) coma
Shock therapy|therapy. 

Some of his treatments may have worsened his
condition because his doctors did not realize the
centrality of work and community to curing mental
illness, and the most successful "treatment" seems
to have been administrative decisions at
Princeton's mathematics department and computer
center to allow Nash to use university facilities
for his researches during this period, although
the researches were initially delusional.

In student and on-campus legend, Nash became "The
Phantom of Fine Hall" (Fine Hall is Princeton's
mathematics center), a shadowy figure who would
scribble arcane equations on blackboards in the
middle of the night. The legend appears in a work
of fiction based on Princeton life, "The Mind-Body
Problem", by Rebecca Goldstein.

However, encouraged by his wife Alicia, Nash
persisted in working in a communitarian setting
where his eccentricities were unremarked and
developed, among other interests, an interest in
the calculation of exact values of large numbers,
researches which drove him to Princeton's
Information Centers, where he developed computer
programs (of high quality) for his work. Here he
had more contact with Princetonians and also, in
the late 1980s, began to use electronic mail to
gradually link with working mathematicians who
realized that he was "John Nash" and his new work
had value.

They formed part of the nucleus of a group that
contacted the Bank of Sweden's Nobel award
committee and was able to vouch for Nash's ability
to receive the award in recognition of his early
work.

The 1990s brought a return of his genius, and Nash
has taken care to manage the symptoms of his
mental illness.  He is still hoping to score
substantial scientific results. His recent work
involves some very interesting ventures in
advanced game theory including partial agency
which show that as in early career, he prefers to
select his own path and problems.

==Career==

He currently holds an appointment in mathematics
at Princeton. While cautious with people he does
not know, insiders cite a dry sense of humor.

The contribution of his wife Alicia was quite
significant. She supported him during his
delusional phase and saw how membership, no matter
how humble, in the Princeton community helped Nash
get better. Alicia also worked, rather
courageously, as a computer programmer in
male-dominated companies to support herself, John,
and their son.

===Recognition===
In 1978 he was awarded the John Von Neumann Theory
Prize for his invention of non-cooperative
equilibriums, now called Nash equilibrium|Nash
equilibria.

In 1994 he received the Bank of Sweden Prize in
Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel as a
result of his game theory work at Princeton as a
graduate student.  

Between 1945 and 1996 John Nash published a total
of twenty three scientific studies.

==A Beautiful Mind==

The film A Beautiful Mind, 2001 in film|released
in 2001 and directed by Ron Howard (American
director)|Ron Howard, was inspired by Nash's life;
it received four Academy Awards, including Academy
Award for Best Picture|Best Picture. The film is
loosely based on the biography of the same title,
written by Sylvia Nasar (1999).

The film has been criticized for its inaccurate
portrayal of John Nash's life and schizophrenia as
well as for the extremely over-simplified
representation of the famous Nash Equilibrium. 
The PBS documentary A Brilliant Madness attempts
to portray his life more accurately.

Major departures from Nash's life and the accurate
book include no mention of Nash's sexual
adventures while at Rand and his second family in
Boston... although his son from Boston plays a bit
part in the movie as a nurse, manhandling Nash in
the hospital. 

The movie shows that Nash joined Wheeler's lab at
MIT after his PhD from Princeton. However, there
exists no lab with such a name at MIT. He was
actually appointed as C.L.E. Moore Instructor at
MIT.

Furthermore, his preservation at Princeton is
shown by the movie as exclusively the work of
professors in the Mathematics department while in
fact administrators, especially at Firestone
Library and the Information Centers in later
years, also played a role. They are unfortunately
portrayed in the movie only as one library clerk
who didn't get interoffice mail.

Also, Nash's hallucinations weren't visual and
auditory as shown in the film. They were auditory,
exclusively. It is true that his handlers, both
from faculty and administration, had to introduce
him to assistants and strangers.

A deleted scene from A Beautiful Mind reveals that
Nash (re)invented the board game Hex (game)|Hex.

==See also==
*List of economists
*List of economics consultancies and think tanks

==External links==

*
http://www.freeinfosociety.com/site.php?postnum=12
8 Extensive John Nash Biography
*
http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1994/nash-
autobio.html Autobiography at the Nobel Prize
website
* http://www.math.princeton.edu/jfnj/ Nash's home
page at Princeton
*
http://reference.allrefer.com/encyclopedia/N/NashJ
F.html John Forbes Nash Jr Information
*
http://www.princeton.edu/mudd/news/faq/topics/nash
.shtml Nash FAQ from Princeton's Mudd Library,
including a copy of
http://www.princeton.edu/mudd/news/faq/topics/Non-
Cooperative_Games_Nash.pdf his dissertation in
Portable Document Format|PDF format 
*http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/archives/2001/02
/27/page3/ Beautiful mind, unconventional matter,
a 2001 Daily Princetonian interview
*
http://www-groups.dcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~history/Ma
thematicians/Nash.html MacTutor biography of Nash
* http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/nash/ PBS
documentary
*
http://film.guardian.co.uk/Distribution/Redirect_A
rtifact/0,4678,0-667864,00.html John Nash speaks
out about alleged bisexuality