Remembering John Nash (1928-2015)
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Nobel laureate economist and mathematician John Nash and his wife Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Lardé died in a car crash this Saturday.
John Forbes Nash, Jr. was famous for revolutionizing game theory and partial differential equations; his insights into non-cooperative games expanded the field of economics and encouraged generations of economists to study how independent agents will behave within complex systems.
A Brilliant Dissertation
Nobel laureate economist and mathematician John Nash and his wife Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Lardé died in a car crash this Saturday.
John Forbes Nash, Jr. was famous for revolutionizing game theory and partial differential equations; his insights into non-cooperative games expanded the field of economics and encouraged generations of economists to study how independent agents will behave within complex systems.
A Brilliant Dissertation
John Nash’s contributions were recognized early in his career, after a breakthrough doctoral dissertation was accepted at Princeton University. Titled simply “Non-Cooperative Games,” the text was only 28-pages. In the work Nash only cites two texts—one by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, which Nash’s work opposes, and an earlier one-page essay by Nash himself.
In a mathematical-heavy work, the dissertation famously concludes that there is equilibrium for non-cooperative and cooperative games, which can be mathematically derived.
At the same time, Nash was able to extend his theories to all kinds of games, of all sizes. “There are situations in economics or international politics in which, effectively, a group of interests are involved in a non-cooperative game without being aware of it; the non-awareness helping to make the situation truly non-cooperative,” he wrote in his dissertation, adding that “we can only expect some sort of approximate equilibrium, since the information, its utilization, and the stability of the average frequencies will be imperfect.”
The dissertation establishes the concept of a “Nash Equilibrium,” which describes when everyone playing a game pursues what is best for them and do not change their strategy even if other opponents in the game do. The insights of Nash’s research have been applied to several economic and political situations.
Early Life
Nash was a native to Bluefield, West Virginia, the son of an electrical engineer and a teacher. He attended public school and was encouraged to learn by his parents; he took advanced mathematics courses at a community college while a senior in high school, and then won a full scholarship to the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University. He switched from chemical engineering to chemistry to mathematics, a field he graduated from in 1948 with both a B.S. and an M.S… He finished his Ph.D. in mathematics just two years later.
Nash’s intelligence was immediately recognized in higher education; his professor at Carnegie wrote only “this man is a genius” in his letter of recommendation to Harvard, where Nash was accepted. Nash chose to pursue a degree at Princeton instead, where he was offered the John S. Kennedy fellowship.
Late Recognition
Although his early work was instrumental in expanding the field of economics and he was quietly recognized in his field for his accomplishments, it was not until 1994 that Nash won the Nobel Prize of Economics, which he shared with John Harsanyi of the University of California at Berkeley and Reinhard Selten of the University of Bonn.
In 1998, Sylvia Nasar published her biography of the economist. Titled “A Beautiful Mind,” it depicts the writer’s personal and professional life, and brought Nash to popular attention with a 2001 film version of the book won the Academy Award for best picture.
Nash lived in West Windsor Township, New Jersey, with his wife. They are survived by their son, John Charles Martin Nash, who also earned a Ph.D. in math.
