This man is a genius.
— Richard Duffin, letter recommending Nash to Princeton (1948)
The letter recommending John Forbes Nash (1928–2015) for doctoral studies at Princeton had a single line. Two years later, aged 21, he handed in a 28-page thesis that would change economics, biology and political science: the idea of the Nash equilibrium. In the following years he solved two problems that the greatest mathematicians thought impossible, one in geometry and the other in differential equations.
At 30, at his peak, he fell ill with schizophrenia. He spent three decades between hospitals and the corridors of Princeton, where students knew him as “the phantom of Fine Hall”, writing mysterious numbers on the blackboards. In the 1990s he recovered. In 1994 he received the Nobel Prize in Economics; in 2015, the Abel Prize in Mathematics. His story became a book and a film, A Beautiful Mind.
In this track we tell Nash’s life and redo, with all the calculations shown, six of his discoveries.
Who he was
John Forbes Nash Jr.
- Nascimento
- 13 June 1928, Bluefield, West Virginia
- Morte
- 23 May 2015, Monroe, New Jersey
- Origem
- United States
- Áreas
- Game theory, differential geometry and partial differential equations
Reading guide
Biography
Discovery and proof
- The game of Hex: why the first player wins
- The Nash equilibrium: nobody does better alone
- Mixed strategies: the penalty kick and odds and evens
- The Nash bargaining solution
- Crumpling without stretching: the embedding theorem
- The heat equation and the regularity of De Giorgi and Nash