Early life and education[edit]

Nash was born on June 13, 1928, in Bluefield, West Virginia, United States. His father, John
Forbes Nash, was an electrical engineer for the Appalachian Electric Power Company. His
mother, Margaret Virginia (ne Martin) Nash, had been a schoolteacher before she married. He
was baptized in the Episcopal Church.[8] He had a younger sister, Martha (born November 16,
1930).
Nash attended kindergarten and public school, and he learned from books provided by his
parents and grandparents.[9] Nash's parents pursued opportunities to supplement their son's
education, and arranged for him to take advanced mathematics courses at a local community
college during his final year of high school. He attended Carnegie Institute of Technology
through a full benefit of the George Westinghouse Scholarship, initially majoring in chemical
engineering. He switched to a chemistry major and eventually, at the advice of his teacher John
Lighton Synge, to mathematics. After graduating in 1948 with both a B.S. and M.S. in
mathematics, Nash accepted a scholarship to Princeton University, where he pursued further
graduate studies in mathematics.[9]
Nash's adviser and former Carnegie professor Richard Duffin wrote a letter of recommendation
for Nash's entrance to Princeton stating, "He is a mathematical genius."[10][11] Nash was accepted at
Harvard University, however, the chairman of the mathematics department at Princeton,
Solomon Lefschetz, offered him the John S. Kennedy fellowship, convincing Nash that
Princeton valued him more.[12] Further, he considered Princeton more favorably because of its
proximity to his family in Bluefield.[9] At Princeton, he began work on his equilibrium theory,
later known as the Nash equilibrium.[citation needed]

Major contributions[edit]
Game theory[edit]
Nash earned a Ph.D. degree in 1950 with a 28-page dissertation on non-cooperative games.[13][14]
The thesis, which was written under the supervision of doctoral advisor Albert W. Tucker,
contained the definition and properties of the Nash equilibrium. A crucial concept in noncooperative games, it won Nash the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994.
Publications authored by Nash relating to the concept are in the following papers:

Nash, John Forbes (1950). "Equilibrium Points in N-person Games". Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 36 (1): 4849. doi:10.1073/pnas.36.1.48. MR 0031701.
PMC 1063129. PMID 16588946.

Nash, John Forbes (1950). "The Bargaining Problem" (PDF). Econometrica 18 (2): 155
62. doi:10.2307/1907266. JSTOR 1907266. MR 0035977.

Nash, John Forbes (1951). "Non-cooperative Games" (PDF). Annals of Mathematics 54

(2): 28695. doi:10.2307/1969529. JSTOR 1969529. MR 0043432.

Nash, John Forbes (1953). "Two-person Cooperative Games" (PDF). Econometrica 21

(1): 12840. doi:10.2307/1906951. MR 0053471.

Other mathematics[edit]
Nash did groundbreaking work[citation needed] in the area of real algebraic geometry:

Nash, John Forbes (1952). "Real algebraic manifolds". Annals of Mathematics 56 (3):
40521. doi:10.2307/1969649. JSTOR 1969649. MR 0050928. See "Proc. Internat.
Congr. Math". AMS. 1952. pp. 51617.

His work in mathematics includes the Nash embedding theorem, which shows that every abstract
Riemannian manifold can be isometrically realized as a submanifold of Euclidean space. He also
made significant contributions to the theory of nonlinear parabolic partial differential equations
and to singularity theory.
John Milnor gives a list of 21 publications.[15]
In the Nash biography, A Beautiful Mind, author Sylvia Nasar explains that Nash was working on
proving Hilbert's nineteenth problem, a theorem involving elliptic partial differential equations
when, in 1956, he suffered a severe disappointment. He learned that an Italian mathematician,
Ennio de Giorgi, had published a proof just months before Nash achieved his proof. Each took
different routes to get to their solutions. The two mathematicians met each other at the Courant
Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University during the summer of 1956. It has
been speculated that if only one had solved the problem, he would have been given the Fields
Medal for the proof.[9]
In 2011, the National Security Agency declassified letters written by Nash in the 1950s, in which
he had proposed a new encryptiondecryption machine.[16] The letters show that Nash had
anticipated many concepts of modern cryptography, which are based on computational hardness.
[17]

Mental illness[edit]

Nash in November 2006 at a game theory conference in Cologne, Germany

Nash's mental illness first began to manifest in the form of paranoia; his wife later describing his
behavior as erratic. Nash seemed to believe that all men who wore red ties were part of a
communist conspiracy against him; Nash mailed letters to embassies in Washington, D.C.,
declaring that they were establishing a government.[4][18] Nash's psychological issues crossed into
his professional life when he gave an American Mathematical Society lecture at Columbia
University in 1959. Originally intended to present proof of the Riemann hypothesis, the lecture
was incomprehensible. Colleagues in the audience immediately realized that something was
wrong.[19]
He was admitted to McLean Hospital in April 1959, staying through May of the same year.
There, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. According to the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, a person suffering from the disorder is typically
dominated by relatively stable, often paranoid, fixed beliefs that are either false, overimaginative or unrealistic, and usually accompanied by experiences of seemingly real perception
of something not actually present. Further signs are marked particularly by auditory and
perceptional disturbances, a lack of motivation for life, and mild clinical depression.[20][21]
In 1961, Nash was admitted to the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton.[22] Over the next nine
years, he spent periods in psychiatric hospitals, where he received both antipsychotic
medications and insulin shock therapy.[21][23][24]
Although he sometimes took prescribed medication, Nash later wrote that he did so only under
pressure. After 1970, he was never committed to a hospital again, and he refused any further
medication. According to Nash, the film A Beautiful Mind inaccurately implied he was taking
what were the new atypical antipsychotics of the time period. He attributed the depiction to the
screenwriter who was worried about the film encouraging people with the disorder to stop taking
their medication.[25] Journalist Robert Whitaker wrote an article suggesting recovery from
illnesses like Nash's can be hindered by such drugs.[26]
Nash felt psychotropic drugs were overrated and that the adverse effects were not given enough
consideration once someone was deemed mentally ill.[27][28][29] According to Sylvia Nasar, author of
the book A Beautiful Mind, on which the movie was based, Nash recovered gradually with the

passage of time. Encouraged by his then former wife, de Lard, Nash worked in a communitarian
setting where his eccentricities were accepted. De Lard said of Nash, "it's just a question of
living a quiet life".[4]
Nash dated the start of what he termed "mental disturbances" to the early months of 1959, when
his wife was pregnant. He described a process of change "from scientific rationality of thinking
into the delusional thinking characteristic of persons who are psychiatrically diagnosed as
'schizophrenic' or 'paranoid schizophrenic'".[9] For Nash, this included seeing himself as a
messenger or having a special function of some kind, of having supporters and opponents and
hidden schemers, along with a feeling of being persecuted and searching for signs representing
divine revelation.[30] Nash suggested his delusional thinking was related to his unhappiness, his
desire to feel important and be recognized, and his characteristic way of thinking, saying, "I
wouldn't have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally." He also said, "If I felt
completely pressureless I don't think I would have gone in this pattern".[31] He did not draw a
categorical distinction between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.[32] Nash reported he did not
hear voices until around 1964, and later engaged in a process of consciously rejecting them.[33] He
further stated he was always taken to hospitals against his will. He only temporarily renounced
his "dream-like delusional hypotheses" after being in a hospital long enough to decide he would
superficially conform to behave normally or to experience "enforced rationality". Only
gradually on his own did he "intellectually reject" some of the "delusionally influenced" and
"politically oriented" thinking as a waste of effort. By 1995, however, even though he was
"thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists," he said he felt more
limited.[9][34]
Nash wrote in 1994:
I spent times of the order of five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an
involuntary basis and always attempting a legal argument for release. And it did happen that
when I had been long enough hospitalized that I would finally renounce my delusional
hypotheses and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and
return to mathematical research. In these interludes of, as it were, enforced rationality, I did
succeed in doing some respectable mathematical research. Thus there came about the research
for "Le problme de Cauchy pour les quations diffrentielles d'un fluide gnral"; the idea that
Prof. Hironaka called "the Nash blowing-up transformation"; and those of "Arc Structure of
Singularities" and "Analyticity of Solutions of Implicit Function Problems with Analytic Data".
But after my return to the dream-like delusional hypotheses in the later 60s I became a person of
delusionally influenced thinking but of relatively moderate behavior and thus tended to avoid
hospitalization and the direct attention of psychiatrists.
Thus further time passed. Then gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally
influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most
recognizably, with the rejection of politically oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of
intellectual effort. So at the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is
characteristic of scientists.[9]

Recognition and later career[edit]

Nash pictured in 2011

In 1978, Nash was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize for his discovery of noncooperative equilibria, now called Nash Equilibria. He won the Leroy P. Steele Prize in 1999.
In 1994, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (along with John Harsanyi
and Reinhard Selten) as a result of his game theory work as a Princeton graduate student. In the
late 1980s, Nash had begun to use email to gradually link with working mathematicians who
realized that he was the John Nash and that 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 were able to
vouch for Nash's mental health ability to receive the award in recognition of his early work.[35]
Nash's later work involved ventures in advanced game theory, including partial agency, which
show that, as in his early career, he preferred to select his own path and problems. Between 1945
and 1996, he published 23 scientific studies.
Nash has suggested hypotheses on mental illness. He has compared not thinking in an acceptable
manner, or being "insane" and not fitting into a usual social function, to being "on strike" from
an economic point of view. He has advanced views in evolutionary psychology about the value
of human diversity and the potential benefits of apparently nonstandard behaviors or roles.[36]
Nash developed work on the role of money in society. Within the framing theorem that people
can be so controlled and motivated by money that they may not be able to reason rationally about
it, he criticized interest groups that promote quasi-doctrines based on Keynesian economics that
permit manipulative short-term inflation and debt tactics that ultimately undermine currencies.
He suggested a global "industrial consumption price index" system that would support the
development of more "ideal money" that people could trust rather than more unstable "bad
money". He noted that some of his thinking parallels economist and political philosopher
Friedrich Hayek's thinking regarding money and a nontypical viewpoint of the function of the
authorities.[37][38]
Nash received an honorary degree, Doctor of Science and Technology, from Carnegie Mellon
University in 1999, an honorary degree in economics from the University of Naples Federico II
on March 19, 2003,[39] an honorary doctorate in economics from the University of Antwerp in
April 2007, an honorary doctorate of science from the City University of Hong Kong on
November 8, 2011,[1] and was keynote speaker at a conference on game theory.[citation needed] He has

also been a prolific guest speaker at a number of world-class events, such as the Warwick
Economics Summit in 2005 held at the University of Warwick. In 2012 he was elected as a
fellow of the American Mathematical Society.[40] On May 19, 2015, a few days before his death,
Nash, along with Louis Nirenberg, was awarded the 2015 Abel Prize by King Harald V of
Norway at a ceremony in Oslo.[41]

Personal life[edit]
In 1951, Nash was hired by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a C. L. E. Moore
instructor in the mathematics faculty. About a year later, Nash began a relationship in
Massachusetts with Eleanor Stier, a nurse he met while admitted as a patient. They had a son,
John David Stier,[1] but Nash left Stier when she told him of her pregnancy.[42] The film based on
Nash's life, A Beautiful Mind, was criticized during the run-up to the 2002 Oscars for omitting
this aspect of his life. He was said to have abandoned her based on her social status, which he
thought to have been beneath his.[43]
In 1954, while in his 20s, Nash was arrested for indecent exposure in a law enforcement sting
operation focusing on homosexual behavior in Santa Monica, California. Although the charges
were dropped, he was stripped of his top-secret security clearance and fired from RAND
Corporation, where he had worked as a consultant.[44]
Not long after breaking up with Stier, Nash met Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Lard (January 1,
1933 May 23, 2015), a naturalized U.S. citizen from El Salvador. De Lard graduated from
MIT, having majored in physics.[9] They married in February 1957; although Nash was an atheist,
the ceremony was performed in a Roman Catholic church.[45][46]
In 1958, Nash earned a tenured position at MIT, and his first signs of mental illness were evident
in early 1959. At this time, his wife was pregnant with their first child. He resigned his position
as a member of the MIT mathematics faculty in the spring of 1959[9] and his wife had him
admitted to McLean Hospital for treatment of schizophrenia that same year. Their son, John
Charles Martin Nash, was born soon afterward. The child was not named for a year[1] because his
wife felt Nash should have a say in the name given to the boy. Due to the stress of dealing with
his illness, Nash and de Lard divorced in 1963. After his final hospital discharge in 1970, Nash
lived in de Lard's house as a boarder. This stability seemed to help him, and he learned how to
consciously discard his paranoid delusions.[47] He stopped taking psychiatric medication and was
allowed by Princeton to audit classes. He continued to work on mathematics and eventually he
was allowed to teach again. In the 1990s, de Lard and Nash resumed their relationship,
remarrying in 2001.

Death[edit]
On May 23, 2015, John and Alicia Nash were killed in a collision on the New Jersey Turnpike
near Monroe Township, New Jersey. They were on their way home after a visit to Norway,
where Nash had received the Abel Prize. The driver of the taxicab in which they were riding
from Newark Airport lost control of the vehicle and struck a guard rail. Both passengers were

ejected from the car upon impact.[48][49][50][51][52] At the time of his death, Nash was 86 years old and a
longtime resident of West Windsor Township, New Jersey.[53][54]
Following his death, obituaries appeared in scientific and popular media throughout the world. In
addition to their obituary for Nash,[55] The New York Times also published an article containing
many notable quotes of Nash, assembled from diverse media and publications, providing his
reflections on his life and achievements.[56]

Representation in culture[edit]
At Princeton, Nash became known as "The Phantom of Fine Hall"[57] (Princeton's mathematics
center), a shadowy figure who would scribble arcane equations on blackboards in the middle of
the night. He is referred to in a novel set at Princeton, The Mind-Body Problem, 1983, by
Rebecca Goldstein.[4]
Sylvia Nasar's biography of Nash, A Beautiful Mind, was published in 1998. A film by the same
name was released in 2001, directed by Ron Howard with Russell Crowe playing Nash.