John
Forbes Nash was born in 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia.
Having received his BS and MS from Carnegie Institute of Technology
(now known as Carnegie Mellon University), he went on to study at
Princeton for his doctorate. While he was there he wrote his thesis
"Non Cooperative Games" and received his doctorate. His
accomplishments included inadvertently proving Brouwers fixed point
theorem and inventing a topological game called "Nash".
Nash taught at MIT from 1951-1959 when he lost his job after being struck with the disease, paranoid schizophrenia. At MIT, he worked on the theory of real algebraic varieties, Riemannum geometry, and parabolic and elliptic differential equations. He was called the most promising mathematician in the world before the disease struck.
Miraculously, the disease began to vanish in the 1970's and Nash returned to his mathematical studies. He won a Nobel Prize in 1994 for a paper written in 1949, called "Nash Equilibrium", for strategic non-cooperative games. He followed this up with "Nash Bargaining Solution"(1951) and "Nash Programme" (1952). Nash is now in his seventies and keeps an office at Princeton in order to continue his work in mathematics.
Reported by: Sabrina Coffelt
References:
Nash, John F. (1994) &endash; Les Prix Nobel , The Nobel Foundation Web Site: Economic Sciences. http://www.nobel.se/laureates/economy-1994-2-autobio.html
Smithsonian: May 1999 Volume 30, Number 2, pg. 135, Book Reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nassar, Simon & Schuster . Web Site: http://irving.vassar.edu/faculty/gj/History/nash.htm