In the United States, John Nash, the Nobel laureate and the prototype of the main character of the film “A Beautiful Mind,” died along with his wife. John Forbes Nash: Mind Games

Original taken from ksonin c Who strummed a coin, and who strummed a guitar...

Oh, here it is interesting news. John Nash, one of those who made fundamental contributions to economic theory, was the first to formulate the central concept of strategic equilibrium in general view and having proved its existence in the general case, the laureate Nobel Prize in economics in 1994, received the most prestigious - the most prestigious? - mathematical prize - Abel Prize. Here is a summary of Nash's (and fellow mathematician Louis Nirenberg's) achievements in the field of partial differential equations. In particular, the role of the “Nash embedding theorem” is described.

In the famous - and still not published in Russian - biography of Nash "The Beautiful Mind" ( Feature Film according to a documentary book in Russian distribution called "A Beautiful Mind") it tells how he did not receive the Fields Medal at 32 years old (although he was among the favorites), and four years later he was buried alive as a scientist due to mental illness. In 1994, the Nobel Committee was concerned about Nash's condition, but decided to give the prize, and the last twenty years have generally gone well. (I attended three of his reports - admittedly, obscure ones - and talked with him three times during this time. Once for a long time...) But the Abel Committee is even cooler - isn’t it great that when the reward finds the hero half a century after the accomplishment of a scientific feat?

________________________________________ ________________________________________ ________
Spelling comment:

John Nash and his son, of course, are the Joy and Pride of our Schizoid Tribe!
(^____^)

And it’s very cool that he managed to regain his mind, to “reassemble” himself after a very stubborn journey into numerology and politics.

Perhaps he naturally had a surplus of interneurons and this helped him decompensate.

Neuroscientists studying schizophrenia and its consequences sometimes talk about the critical role of gray matter in the prefrontal region - schizophrenia in general weakens the ability to make balanced, correct, economical conclusions about existence, but if there is a supply of neurons, then there is a very small opportunity to crawl back into a normal state , due to the willpower created by the prefrontal.

1958 turned out to be a difficult year for the scientist, because the age of thirty is considered critical for all mathematicians - most of the great scientists made their key discoveries under 30 years of age, and John Nash, despite the fact that Fortune magazine called him “ rising star» USA in the field of mathematics, failed in his attempts to prove Riemann's theorem. Stressful situation Also caused by his wife's pregnancy. Nash’s colleagues noticed the first oddities back in new year party– the mathematician showed up dressed as a baby. Gradually, delusional ideas of persecution and grandeur began to form, and thinking became pathologically symbolic. Nash began to feel that forces from outer space were sending him messages through the New York Times; he saw his image in the portrait of Pope John the 23rd, explaining that “23” was his favorite prime number. The scientist refused a prestigious position at the University of Chicago, declaring that he was already the Emperor of Antarctica. He decided that space aliens were watching him and international organizations who are trying to ruin his career. He considered himself a prophet, called upon to convey encrypted messages from aliens to people, looking for them in ordinary newspaper articles. In the end, his wife put him in private psychiatric clinic
near Boston, where John Nash was diagnosed with a paranoid form of schizophrenia and tried to be treated with a combination of pharmacotherapy and psychoanalysis.

The scientist quickly learned to dissimulate the symptoms, and he was discharged from the hospital 50 days later. John immediately resigned from the institute and went to France in search of political asylum, because he believed that there was some kind of secret conspiracy of the American government against him. Only after 9 months of wandering around Europe did the French authorities manage to deport him to America, accompanied by a special military attaché. Relatives forcibly hospitalized Nash again only 2 years after his first stay in the hospital.

Nash spent six months in the hospital and underwent insulin therapy for 1.5 months.
After discharge, the scientist’s condition improved briefly, and he wrote his first scientific work in 4 years, dedicated to the dynamics of fluids.
However, John soon fled to Europe again, from where he sent numerous postcards to his family and colleagues, covered with incomprehensible numerological messages.

The scientist himself describes this period of his life as follows: “I also heard voices when I was sick. Like in a dream. At first I had hallucinatory ideas, and then these voices began to answer my own thoughts, and this continued for several years. In the end I realized that this was just part of my thinking, a product of the subconscious or an alternative stream of consciousness.”

The mathematician's wife, Alicia Lard, tired of fighting the invisible ghosts and pursuers surrounding her husband, divorced him in 1962, giving up after a second hospitalization did not produce a visible effect of recovery. She practically raised the scientist's son herself, who, like the first, illegitimate, was named after his father - John. Younger son He also chose the profession of mathematician, and, unfortunately, inherited his father’s schizophrenia. Alicia, however, always felt responsible for her husband and, probably tormented by a sense of guilt and duty, sheltered the practically homeless Nash in 1970 at her home. Almost 40 years after the divorce, in 2001, they were married again.

Periodically, John Nash experienced short-term remissions; only during these periods did he take maintenance treatment, finally abandoning antipsychotics in the 70s. During remissions, friends arranged for Nash to work, and between 1970 and 1980. The scientist spent all his time wandering the corridors and classrooms of Princeton University and leaving numerous calculations and formulas on the boards. The students nicknamed this eccentric man the Ghost. We should pay tribute to John Nash’s colleagues who showed support and understanding, because the mathematical community has always been tolerant of people with mental disabilities and simply oddities, remember Newton or Einstein. By the beginning of the 80s, productive symptoms had practically disappeared and, to the surprise of his colleagues, Nash gradually began to return to “big” mathematics. According to John himself, he decided to no longer listen to voices and think more rationally.
Of course, John Nash did not overcome mental illness, he did something much more, requiring colossal volitional efforts of the individual - he learned to live with it.

In general, the fact that he appeared in a baby costume was not a random idea. This was a strong rollback, of a regressive nature, into the oceanic polymorph. Babies are more dangerous than axolotls. Because they are more helpless, they don’t even have a tooth, and they don’t have the ability to regenerate their paws, if something happens.

I had a period when, after holotropic breathing sessions, I dreamed of aliens mixed with dead chicks and dead babies varying degrees abortion rate. You can even find this post somewhere on LiveJournal.
It was a difficult period in life. Studying put a lot of pressure on me.
The psyche really wanted to regress, free up insufficient RAM, “reset” settings and “clean cookies” :)

Symbols and mythology, perhaps, are so attractive to us schizos, also because they allow us to absorb a large amount of information (vital), but at the same time avoid confusion in our heads, structure chaos (people generally don’t like randomness too much, and schizos are schizoteric often they “see connections where there are none.” Statistics and probability theory are saving for us; they allow us to accept randomness and chaos as a part of Order. high level. Although for some reason this did not help Nash the mathematician, perhaps due to some individual uncritical delusional considerations)

We are very archaic in some things. Talking about the “primitive clever women,” Drobyshevsky described their method of working with the world as follows:

Modern life is very different from Paleolithic life. Now a person receives everything ready: food, things, and information. Very few modern civilized people are able to make any tools from natural materials. In the best case, a person combines ready-made elements, for example, fitting an ax blade onto an ax handle. But he does not make an ax from the very beginning - from mining ore and cutting down a stick for an ax handle (much less cutting down with a tool personally made). Modern man he didn’t carry wood, didn’t saw sticks, didn’t dig ore, didn’t forge iron - so he has nothing, in the sense of brains.

Specialization is not a problem of the 20th century, as one often hears. It appeared in the early Neolithic, with the first large harvest, which made it possible to feed people engaged in something other than food production.
Potters, weavers, scribes, storytellers and other specialists appeared. Some began to know how to chop wood, others - to light a stove, and still others - to cook porridge.

Civilization has made a powerful leap forward, and the number general information has grown fabulously, but in the head of each individual person the knowledge has noticeably decreased.
Civilization is so complex that one person, in principle, cannot fit even a small part of general information into his head; usually he does not try, he does not need to.

The contradiction noted by Drobyshevsky is noteworthy: the more switch neurons, the more connections, the slower the signal actually travels.
However, the slower the signal travels, the more people"slows down" with conclusions, the more accurate these conclusions are.

If we use it in a schizoid way quick heuristics, then the situation is the opposite - a small number of connections allows you to quickly “jump” from one place to another, bypassing intermediate “control points” and any boring and dull bureaucracy of conscience.

And further important point. Myths. It was precisely the myths, perhaps, with their numerology, astrology and symbolic language, that played a mnemonic role in memorizing large amounts of information and were eager to compensate for the lack of accuracy.
7 wonders of the world, 7 colors of the rainbow, Egyptian Ennead of the Gods, trigrams and hexagrams.

This is schizoteric now.

And then it (maybe) was a mnemonic.

Exactly mythopoetic narratives made it possible to structure information about the world very well mnemonically.
In addition, the world was alive and animated - and quite transparently aggressive.

Paranoid schizophrenia would not hurt to survive to primitive man in the conditions in which it originated.
Moreover, there is reason to believe that in near-shamanic times she could even help organize social connections and remember family relationships through ancestral totems, avoiding, if possible, incest of maternal blood.

I have a schizoid suspicion that even now for some people this is “not a luxury, but a necessity.”

A similar idea, however, was often expressed by Lacanian psychoanalysts before me.
Dmitry Olshansky greatly appreciates, for example, the significance of delirium in structuring a “totally explainable” psychotic picture of the world, where words and reality coincide with each other - and there is no “reality-accident, reality beyond the boundaries of language.”

John Forbes Nash Jr. (English) John Forbes Nash, Jr.; genus. June 13, 1928, Bluefield, West Virginia) is an American mathematician working in the fields of game theory and differential geometry. Winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics “for the analysis of equilibrium in the theory of non-cooperative games” (together with Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi). Famous general public mostly based on Ron Howard's biographical drama A Beautiful Mind ( A Beautiful Mind) about his mathematical genius and struggle with schizophrenia.

John Nash was born on June 13, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia, into a strict Protestant family. His father worked as an engineer at Appalachian Electric Power, and his mother worked as a school teacher for 10 years before her marriage. At school I was an average student, and I didn’t like mathematics at all - they taught it in a boring way at school. When Nash was 14 years old, he came across Eric T. Bell's book, The Makers of Mathematics. " After reading this book, I was able to outside help, prove Fermat's little theorem"- writes Nash in his autobiography. This is how his mathematical genius declared himself. But that was only the beginning.

After school, he studied at the Carnegie Polytechnic Institute (now the private Carnegie Mellon University), where Nash tried to study chemistry, took a course in international economics, and then finally decided to take up mathematics. In 1948, after graduating from college with two degrees - a bachelor's and a master's - he entered Princeton University. Nash's institute teacher Richard Duffin provided him with one of the most laconic letters of recommendation. There was only one line in it: “ This man is a genius!» ( This man is a genius).

Scientific achievements

At Princeton, John Nash heard about game theory, then only introduced by John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern. Game theory captured his imagination, so much so that at the age of 20 John Nash was able to create the foundations scientific method, which played a huge role in the development of the world economy. In 1949, the 21-year-old scientist wrote a dissertation on game theory. Forty-five years later he received the Nobel Prize in Economics for this work. Nash's contributions have been described as follows: " For fundamental analysis of equilibrium in the theory of non-cooperative games».

Neumann and Morgenstern dealt with so-called zero-sum games, in which one side's gain is equal to the other's loss. Between 1950 and 1953, Nash published four groundbreaking papers that provided insightful analysis of non-zero-sum games, a class of games in which the winners' winnings are not equal to the losers' losses. An example of such a game would be negotiations on a salary increase between the trade union and the company management. This situation can end either in a long strike in which both sides suffer, or in the achievement of a mutually beneficial agreement. Nash was able to discern the new face of competition by simulating a situation that later became known as “ Nash equilibrium" or " non-cooperative equilibrium", in which both parties use an ideal strategy, which leads to the creation of a stable equilibrium. It is beneficial for the players to maintain this balance, since any change will only worsen their situation.

In 1951, John Nash began working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. There he wrote a number of articles on real algebraic geometry and the theory of Riemannian manifolds, which were highly appreciated by his contemporaries. But John’s colleagues avoided him - his work mathematically substantiated Karl Marx’s theory of surplus value, which was then considered heretical in the United States during the “witch hunt.” Even his girlfriend, nurse Eleanor Stier, who was expecting a child from him, leaves the outcast John. So Nash became a father, but he refused to give his name to the child on the birth certificate, and also refused to provide any financial support to his mother in order to avoid their persecution by the McCarthy Commission.

Nash has to leave MIT, although he was listed as a professor there until 1959, and he goes to California to work at the RAND Corporation ( Research and Development), engaged in analytical and strategic developments for the US government, in which leading American scientists worked. There, again thanks to his research in game theory, Nash became one of the leading experts in the field of cold war.

Scientific works

"The Bidding Problem" ( The Bargaining Problem, 1950);

"Non-cooperative games" ( Non-cooperative Games, 1951);

Real algebraic manifolds, Ann. Math. 56 (1952), 405-421;

C 1 -isometric imbeddings, Ann. Math. 60 (1954); 383-396.

Continuity of solutions of parabolic and elliptic equations, Amer. J. Math. 80 (1958), 931-954.

John Forbes Nash Jr.(English) John Forbes Nash, Jr.; June 13, 1928, Bluefield, West Virginia - May 23, 2015, New Jersey) was an American mathematician who worked in the fields of game theory and differential geometry.

Winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics “for the analysis of equilibrium in the theory of non-cooperative games” (together with Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi). Known to the general public mostly for Ron Howard's biographical drama A Beautiful Mind. A Beautiful Mind) about his mathematical genius and struggle with schizophrenia.

Biography

John Nash was born on June 13, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia, into a strictly Protestant family. His father worked as an electrical engineer for Appalachian Electric Power, and his mother worked as a school teacher for 10 years before her marriage. At school I was an average student, and I didn’t like mathematics at all - they taught it in a boring way at school. When Nash was 14 years old, he came across Eric T. Bell's book, The Makers of Mathematics. “After reading this book, I was able to prove Fermat’s little theorem myself, without outside help,” Nash writes in his autobiography. This is how his mathematical genius declared himself. But that was only the beginning.

Studies

After school, he studied at the Carnegie Polytechnic Institute (now the private Carnegie Mellon University), where Nash tried to study chemistry, took a course in international economics, and then finally decided to take up mathematics. In 1947, after graduating from college with two degrees - a bachelor's and a master's - he entered Princeton University. Nash's institute teacher Richard Duffin provided him with one of the most laconic letters of recommendation. There was only one line in it: “This man is a genius.” This man is a genius).

Job

At Princeton, John Nash heard about game theory, then only introduced by John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern. Game theory captured his imagination, so much so that at the age of 20, John Nash was able to create the foundations of a scientific method that played a huge role in the development of the world economy. In 1949, the 21-year-old scientist wrote a dissertation on game theory. Forty-five years later he received the Nobel Prize in Economics for this work. Nash's contribution was described as: "For fundamental analysis of equilibrium in the theory of non-cooperative games."

Neumann and Morgenstern dealt with so-called zero-sum games, in which one side's gain is equal to the other's loss. Between 1950 and 1953, Nash published four groundbreaking papers that provided insightful analysis of non-zero-sum games, a class of games in which the winners' winnings are not equal to the losers' losses. An example of such a game would be negotiations on a salary increase between the trade union and the company management. This situation can end either in a long strike in which both sides suffer, or in the achievement of a mutually beneficial agreement. Nash was able to discern a new face of competition by modeling a situation that was later called the “Nash equilibrium” or “non-cooperative equilibrium”, in which both parties use an ideal strategy, which leads to the creation of a stable equilibrium. It is beneficial for the players to maintain this balance, since any change will only worsen their situation.

In 1951, John Nash began working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge. There he wrote a number of articles on real algebraic geometry and the theory of Riemannian manifolds, which were highly appreciated by his contemporaries. But John’s colleagues avoided him - his work mathematically substantiated Karl Marx’s theory of surplus value, which was then considered heretical in the United States during the “witch hunt.” Even his girlfriend, nurse Eleanor Stier, who was expecting a child from him, leaves the outcast John. After becoming a father, he refused to give his name to the child on the birth certificate, or to provide any financial support to his mother, in order to protect them from persecution by the McCarthy Commission.

Nash had to leave MIT, although he was listed as a professor there until 1959, and he went to California to work at the RAND Corporation, which was engaged in analytical and strategic developments for the US government, in which leading American scientists worked. There, again thanks to his research in game theory, Nash became one of the leading experts in the field of Cold War warfare. Although the RAND Corporation is known as a haven for dissidents in opposition to Washington, even there John did not get along. In 1954, he was fired after police arrested him for indecent exposure - changing clothes in a men's room on the beach in Santa Monica.

Disease

Soon John Nash met a student, a Colombian beauty Alicia Lard, and in 1957 they got married. In July 1958, Fortune magazine named Nash America's rising star in the "new mathematics." Soon Nash's wife became pregnant, but this coincided with Nash's illness - he began to develop symptoms of schizophrenia. At this time, John was 30 years old, and Alicia was 26. Alicia tried to hide everything that was happening from friends and colleagues, wanting to save Nash’s career. The deterioration of her husband's condition depressed Alicia more and more.

In 1959 he lost his job. Over time Nash was involuntarily committed to a private psychiatric clinic in the suburbs of Boston, McLean Hospital, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and subjected to psychopharmacological treatment. Nash's lawyer managed to get him released from the hospital after 50 days. After discharge, Nash decided to go to Europe. Alicia left her newborn son with her mother and followed her husband. Nash tried to obtain political refugee status in France, Switzerland and the GDR and renounce his American citizenship.

However, under pressure from the US State Department, these countries denied Nash asylum. In addition, Nash’s actions were monitored by the American naval attache, who blocked his appeals to embassies different countries. Finally, the US authorities managed to achieve the return Nash- He was arrested by the French police and deported to the United States. Upon their return, they settled in Princeton, where Alicia found work. But Nash's illness progressed: he was constantly afraid of something, spoke about himself in the third person, wrote meaningless postcards, called former colleagues. They listened patiently to his endless discussions about numerology and the state of political affairs in the world.

In January 1961, a completely depressed Alicia, John's mother and his sister Martha made a difficult decision: to admit John to Trenton State Hospital in New Jersey, where John underwent insulin therapy - a harsh and risky treatment, 5 days a week for two and a half months. After his discharge, Nash's colleagues from Princeton decided to help him by offering him a job as a researcher, but John again went to Europe, but this time alone. He sent home only mysterious letters. In 1962, after three years Out of turmoil, Alicia divorced John. With the support of her mother, she raised her son herself. He subsequently also developed schizophrenia.

Fellow mathematicians continued to help Nash- They gave him a job at the university and arranged a meeting with a psychiatrist who prescribed antipsychotic medications. Nash's condition improved and he began spending time with Alicia and his first son, John David. “It was a very encouraging time,” recalls John’s sister Martha. - It was quite a long period. But then things started to change.” John stopped taking his medication, fearing that it might impair his thinking, and the symptoms of schizophrenia reappeared.

In 1970, Alicia Nash, confident that she had made a mistake by betraying her husband, accepted him again, and this may have saved the scientist from homelessness. In subsequent years, Nash continued to go to Princeton, writing strange formulas on the boards. Princeton students nicknamed him "The Phantom."

Then in the 1980s, Nash became noticeably better - his symptoms subsided and he became more involved in surrounding life. The disease, to the surprise of the doctors, began to recede. In fact, Nash began to learn to ignore her and returned to mathematics. “Now I think quite rationally, like any scientist,” Nash writes in his autobiography. “I won’t say that this gives me the joy that anyone recovering from a physical illness experiences. Rational thinking limits man’s ideas about his connection with the cosmos.”

Confession

On October 11, 1994, at the age of 66, John Nash received the Nobel Prize for his work on game theory.

However, he was deprived of the opportunity to give the traditional Nobel lecture at Stockholm University, as the organizers feared for his condition. Instead, a seminar was organized (with the participation of the laureate) to discuss his contributions to game theory. After this, John Nash was nevertheless invited to give a lecture at another university - Uppsala. According to Christer Kiselman, a professor at the Institute of Mathematics at Uppsala University who invited him, the lecture was dedicated to cosmology.

In 2001, 38 years after their divorce, John and Alicia remarried. Nash returned to his office in Princeton, where he continues to work on mathematics.

In 2008, John Nash gave a talk on "Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money" at international conference Game Theory and Management in High school management of St. Petersburg State University.

In 2015, John Nash received the highest honor in mathematics, the Abel Prize, for his contributions to the theory of nonlinear differential equations.

"Mind games"

In 1998, American journalist (and Columbia University economics professor) Sylvia Nasar wrote a biography of Nash entitled A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash. Nobel laureate John Nash"). The book instantly became a bestseller.

In 2001, under the direction of Ron Howard, based on the book, the film “A Beautiful Mind” was shot (in Russian box office - “A Beautiful Mind”). The film received four Oscars (for best movie, Best Adapted Screenplay, Director and Supporting Actress), a Golden Globe Award and was awarded several BAFTA awards.

Bibliography

“The Bargaining Problem” (1950);
"Non-cooperative Games" (1951).
Real algebraic manifolds, Ann. Math. 56 (1952), 405-421.
C1-isometric imbeddings, Ann. Math. 60 (1954), 383-396.
Continuity of solutions of parabolic and elliptic equations, Amer. J. Math. 80 (1958), 931-954.

Having realized himself in the field of game theory and differential geometry, John Nash won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 along with his colleagues Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi, “for their analysis of equilibrium in the theory of non-cooperative games.”

He rose to prominence with Ron Howard's biopic, A Beautiful Mind, about Nash's mathematical genius and his attempt to overcome paranoid schizophrenia.

John Forbes Nash Jr. was born on June 13, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia (Bluefield, West Virginia, U.S.). He grew up in a strict Protestant family. His mother worked as a school teacher for 10 years before her marriage, and his father was an engineer. IN school years Nash did not stand out from other students, and was generally lukewarm about mathematics, but only because the teachers presented it in a very boring way. At the age of 14, he became interested in Eric T. Bell's book "The Creators of Mathematics", mastered it without the help of adults and proved Fermat's little theorem. This is how he awakened his mathematical genius.

At the Carnegie Institute of Technology, John tried to focus on chemistry and economics, after which he became convinced that mathematics was truly his element. After leaving the university with a bachelor's and master's degree in 1948, he went to Princeton University, where one of his teachers, Richard Duffin, while working on a letter of recommendation for Nash, put everything into one precise phrase: "This man is a genius!"

It was at Princeton that John learned about game theory, which captured his imagination, and in his 20s he was able to develop the foundations of a scientific method that would have a particular impact on the development of the world economy. In 1949, he submitted a dissertation on game theory to win the Nobel Prize in Economics 40 years later. Between 1950 and 1953, John Nash published four papers with in-depth analyzes of non-zero-sum games. Subsequently, the situation he modeled was called a “Nash equilibrium” (or “non-cooperative equilibrium”), in which the winning and losing participants use an ideal strategy that leads to the creation of a stable equilibrium.

In 1951, Nash went to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, where he wrote a series of papers on real algebraic geometry, and also touched on the theory of Riemannian manifolds. However, his works mathematically substantiated Karl Marx's theory of surplus value, which is why John became an outcast. He was shunned by his colleagues and abandoned by his girlfriend, nurse Eleanor Stier, who gave birth to his son, John David Stier.

As a result, Nash left MIT and moved to California, where he became one of the leading specialists at RAND, a “haven for dissidents.” And yet he lost this job too, after the police arrested the mathematician “for indecent behavior” in 1954.

John Nash met student Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Lardé at MIT, and they married in 1957. Soon his 26-year-old wife became pregnant, but this joyful event was overshadowed by the first symptoms of schizophrenia in 30-year-old Nash. Depressed Alicia, trying to save her husband's career, hid everything that was happening in the family, but in 1959 Nash still lost his job. The mathematician was forcibly placed in private mental asylum, where they defined “paranoid schizophrenia” and used psychopharmacological treatment.

Having got out of the mental hospital through the efforts of his lawyer after 50 days, John left for Europe. Alicia left her mother's son and followed her husband. The couple could not find refuge in other countries because... They were followed everywhere by the US State Department and the American naval attaché. After French police detained and handed him over to authorities, he was deported to the United States.

His illness, meanwhile, did not stand still. Nash spoke about himself in the third person, was depressed by groundless fears, called former colleagues and talked endlessly about numerology and politics. In January 1961, the mathematician, after a difficult decision by his loved ones, again found himself in the hospital, where he underwent a dangerous course of insulin therapy. After treatment, he went to Europe for the second time, but without Alicia. In 1962, his wife divorced him; Nash's son subsequently also developed schizophrenia.

Fellow mathematicians supported John. He got a job at the university and was taking antipsychotic medication. His illness subsided for a while, but soon, recovering, he was afraid that medical supplies will harm his mental activity. Schizophrenia has returned. Yet in 1970, guilt-ridden Alicia took Nash back, which may have saved him from homeless status.

His students nicknamed him "The Phantom", always writing strange formulas on the boards. Finally, in the 1980s, the disease, to the surprise of doctors, began to recede again. Nash continued to study his favorite mathematics, this time “reasonable”, and stated that common thinking still does not so closely connect man with the cosmos.

Nobel laureate and just very strong in spirit personality John Nash is a scientist who formulated the foundations of a method that has had a significant influence on modern world economy. He received his main award for his work on game theory, which he published at age 21. But Nash’s genius coexisted with symptoms of schizophrenia, and a life full of sharp turns, unfortunately, did not include a peaceful death among his family.

The last chapter in the biography

Three years ago, on May 23, 2015, in the city of Monroe (Gloucester County, American state New Jersey) occurred car accident with human casualties. The taxi driver, having driven into the oncoming lane to overtake, lost control and a collision occurred.

The person responsible for the accident was taken to the hospital. He survived with minor injuries. But two passengers who were not wearing seat belts were thrown out of the cabin. Medics who arrived at the scene of the traffic accident pronounced both the man and the woman dead.

The dead were mathematician John Nash and his wife Alicia. The Nobel laureate died at the age of 87, and his wife died at the age of 82. Such was the death of a brilliant scientist, whose life was full of dramatic turns.

From hatred to life's work

John Forbes Nash Jr. was born on June 13, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia. His father was an electrical engineer, and his mother, who had worked as a school teacher for 10 years before her marriage, was now a housewife. Nash's family was strictly Protestant.

Little John was an ordinary child, showing no signs that he will win the Nobel Prize in Economics in a couple of decades. The boy preferred outdoor games to lessons, studied averagely, did not like exact sciences, and especially mathematics. The teacher literally instilled in his student a disgust for the subject being studied.

At the age of 14, John Nash came across the book “The Creators of Mathematics” by Eric T. Bell, a mathematician and author of science fiction books. The teenager became incredibly interested in reading. After reading the book, he was able to prove Fermat's theorem on his own. Nash would later write about this interesting fact in his autobiography.

After school, the young man entered the Polytechnical Institute(now it's private educational institution- Carnegie Mellon University). There he did not consider mathematics at all as his vocation, but initially studied chemistry and international economics. Only after that John Nash decided to take up mathematics, since it was closest to him.

In 1947, nineteen-year-old Nash Jr. graduated from the university with a bachelor's and master's degrees simultaneously. His supervisor's letter of recommendation spoke for itself. Richard Duffin wrote that "John Nash is a mathematical genius."

"He's a math genius"

After graduating from the Carnegie Institute, the young scientist entered Princeton University. It was there that he first heard information about game theory, which captured his imagination. At the age of twenty, he formulated the foundations of a method that later played an important role in the world economy.

In 1949, Nash published a dissertation on game theory. John Nash has found his life's work. Five years later, it was for this work that he would receive his most important award - the Nobel Prize. Officially, the award was awarded “for the fundamental analysis of equilibrium in game theory.”

During 1950-1953, the scientist published four more works in the field of zero-sum games. They all became revolutionary. He discovered the possibility of a state of equilibrium, with all parties using a strategy that leads to equilibrium. This result was later called the “Nash equilibrium.”

In '51, John Nash began working at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(better known as MIT). At this time, he wrote several works on the theory of varieties and algebraic geometry, which were highly appreciated by his contemporaries. He is the author of The Bidding Problem and Non-Cooperative Games.

Colleagues recognized the uniqueness of John Nash's knowledge, but the team did not like him. The young scientist was a genius, but seemed to those around him closed, uncommunicative, gloomy, selfish and arrogant person. But these are not his natural character traits, but signs of an approaching illness.

Another reason for the alienation of his colleagues was that his works proved mathematical methods loyalty to the theory of Karl Marx. Here we're talking about on the theory of surplus value. But these were the times of the “witch hunt,” when such communist sentiments threatened not just loss of work, but also criminal prosecution.

At the same time, John Nash had problems in his personal life, but more on that below.

A little about game theory

Not all readers understand mathematical theories, so a short explanation would be helpful. Game theory is a method for studying optimal strategies in processes that involve two or more parties fighting to realize their interests. This theory allows you to choose the best strategy, that is, the one that will lead to winning.

Methods for studying strategies in games most often find their application in economics, and somewhat less frequently in sociology, ethics, psychology, political science, law and other sciences. Since the seventies, it has been adopted by biologists who have studied animal behavior and the theory of evolution.

John Nash's theory is of exceptional importance for cybernetics, artificial intelligence and modern technologies. During and after World War II, the theory was of interest to the military, who saw it as a way to explore strategic decisions.

Personal life of an outstanding scientist

In 1951, John was abandoned by his girlfriend, nurse Eleanor Stier (according to another version - Stier). It is unknown why this happened. There is an opinion that the girl could not stand the arrogant attitude of her lover (it soon turned out that he was sick), and someone says that Eleanor was afraid of persecution by the authorities for Nash’s “communist” research.

Whatever the real reason for the breakup, all that is known is that Stier was expecting a child at that time. John Nash did not give his son his last name. In the future, he did not financially support the mother of John David Stier (Styer).

The heroine of the new novel by John Forbes Nash Jr. is student Alicia Lard. The girl was not stopped by the scientist’s oddities, and already in 1957 they officially became spouses. Life has improved. Alicia was expecting her first child, and popular science publications called John Nash Jr. “the rising star of American science.” But the strangeness in the man’s behavior increased.

Voices in the head and “secret information”

The scientist heard voices that no one else heard; he began to mention every now and then some kind of “conspiracy against America” and “secret information.” The mathematician began to show signs of mental illness. Alicia, a 26-year-old woman on recent months pregnancy, tried to help her husband overcome schizophrenia, but John’s behavior was very difficult to control.

In 1959, the researcher was fired. Everything went downhill. Nash was hospitalized in a clinic, where he was injected with powerful drugs for almost two months. But the pharmacological effect only worsened John Nash's condition.

Princeton Phantom

Then Nash decided to go to Europe. Alicia left her son with relatives, going to pick up her husband. John asked for political asylum in several European countries, but was refused everywhere, since the Europeans were concerned about his health condition, and the US authorities also exerted pressure. They did not want the genius to leave their sphere of influence.

Nash was arrested and forcibly sent to America. There's a scientist's state Once again worsened. His notes resembled incoherent nonsense, rather than the study of a mathematical genius. Yesterday's colleagues listened to John's ideas only out of compassion.

In 1961, he was again admitted to a psychiatric clinic. After being discharged from the hospital, Nash went to Europe again, this time Alicia remained at home. The scientist's wife divorced. Their common son she began to raise her alone. By the way, his talent for mathematics and schizophrenia were passed on to him from his father.

For a while, Nash returned to a (relatively) normal life, but a new deterioration followed. In the early seventies, all that remained of the brilliant scientist was a man in old clothes, who sometimes could not find a place to sleep. Saved him ex-wife. Alicia took John back and helped him, and in 2011 they got married again.

For many years, students at Princeton University called future Nobel laureate John Nash the Phantom. He received this nickname because more than once he suddenly appeared in offices and wrote down formulas on the board, the meaning of which was clear only to him.

Thoughts of a genius mathematician

In the early eighties, they began to forget about John Nash as a scientist who showed great promise, but it was then that something happened that no one expected. His notes and speech again became meaningful, and his formulas became not the ravings of a mentally ill person, but thoughts genius mathematician. Doctors couldn't explain it, but Nash won his battle with schizophrenia. He simply began to ignore the voices in his head, and they gradually disappeared.

John Nash quickly returned to the level of science that he had before his illness. In 1994, the scientist was awarded the Nobel Prize. She was awarded the work created in 1949. By the way, Nash was not given the Nobel lecture. This interesting fact was explained by the organizers. They were simply afraid that Nash's health would affect the performance and something would go wrong.

“Beautiful Mind” S. Nazar

Four years after Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize, Sylvia Nazar wrote a biography of the scientist. The work is called "A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash." The book sold well and attracted many Hollywood producers.

Film "A Beautiful Mind"

In 2001, a film based on the book by Sylvia Nazar was released. Russell Crowe played John Nash. With a budget of 58 million US dollars, the film grossed 313 million. It was a stunning success. In addition, A Beautiful Mind was awarded four Oscars. Of course, the cinematic history differed from the real one, but this did not prevent Nash from becoming popular not only in scientific circles, but also among the general public. This film is worth watching not only for those who are interested in science and the personality of this scientist, but also for educational purposes.

Nobel and Abel Prizes

Interesting fact: John Nash became the first person in the world of science to simultaneously hold both the Nobel Prize and the Abel Prize. The Abelevskaya was established by the Norwegian government as an analogue of the Prize named after. Nobel for mathematicians. This triumph was an excellent final step in scientific career Nash.

Some Nash sayings

Biography of John Nash - most interesting story, some of his sayings will help you understand it completely. For example, about the future:

I don't know what future awaits me. Even if I don't have much left. Of course, in general, the future is endless, unless something bad happens or a miracle happens.

About problems and solutions:

The problem is solved the moment it is posed.

Touching words about love, which may have become John’s confession to his wife Alicia:

I'm here today only because of you. You - the only reason my presence. You are all my reasons.

A short dialogue about science, love and faith:

- Tell me, is the Universe great? - Infinite... - How do you know? - All the data point to this. - But this has not been proven, have you not seen it yourself? Why are you sure? - I’m not sure, I believe. - It’s the same with love...

About mathematics as an art and my attitude towards biologists:

Mathematics is a very specific science, it is special kind art, no matter what people around you tell you, especially those who study biology.

About questions and answers, the nature of genius:

Geniuses know the answer before they know the question.

The death of the great mathematician was a tragedy for science. During his long, but still prematurely ended life, he managed to do a lot. Perhaps, if not for illness, Nash would have been able to formulate even more important scientific theories, laws and develop several additional techniques. But there is also a possibility that it was precisely because of such a destructive predisposition to schizophrenia that he became a mathematical genius. It's a fine line. We can only hope that modern history will recognize more than one equally talented scientist, but with a calmer fate.