Skip to content Skip to navigation View mobile version

The New York Times

1. Loading...
Advertisement

Science

John F. Nash Jr., Math Genius Defined by a

Beautiful Mind, Dies at 86
By ERICA GOODEMAY 24, 2015
Continue reading the main story Share This Page
Photo
John F. Nash Jr. at his Princeton graduation in 1950, when he received his doctorate.
John F. Nash Jr., a mathematician who shared a Nobel in 1994 for work that greatly extended
the reach and power of modern economic theory and whose long descent into severe mental
illness and eventual recovery were the subject of a book and a film, both titled A Beautiful
Mind, was killed, along with his wife, in a car crash on Saturday in New Jersey. He was 86.
Dr. Nash and his wife, Alicia, 82, were in a taxi on the New Jersey Turnpike in Monroe
Township around 4:30 p.m. when the driver lost control while veering from the left lane to
the right and hit a guardrail and another car, Sgt. Gregory Williams of the New Jersey State
Police said.
The couple were ejected from the cab and pronounced dead at the scene. The State Police
said it appeared that they had not been wearing seatbelts. The taxi driver and the driver of the
other car were treated for injuries. No criminal charges had been filed on Sunday.
The Nashes were returning home from the airport after a trip to Norway, where Dr. Nash and
Louis Nirenberg, a mathematician from New York University, had received the Abel Prize
from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Continue reading the main story
Advertisement
Continue reading the main story
Dr. Nash was widely regarded as one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century, known
for the originality of his thinking and for his fearlessness in wrestling down problems so

difficult that few others dared tackle them. A one-sentence letter written in support of his
application to Princetons doctoral program in math said simply, This man is a genius.
Johns remarkable achievements inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and
scientists, the president of Princeton, Christopher L. Eisgruber, said on Sunday, and the
story of his life with Alicia moved millions of readers and moviegoers, who marveled at their
courage in the face of daunting challenges.
Russell Crowe, who portrayed Dr. Nash in the 2001 film adaptation of A Beautiful Mind,
posted on Twitter that he was stunned by the deaths. An amazing partnership, he wrote.
Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts.
Dr. Nashs theory of noncooperative games, published in 1950 and known as Nash
equilibrium, provided a conceptually simple but powerful mathematical tool for analyzing a
wide range of competitive situations, from corporate rivalries to legislative decision-making.
Dr. Nashs approach is now pervasive in economics and throughout the social sciences and
applied in other fields as well, including evolutionary biology.
Harold W. Kuhn, an emeritus professor of mathematics at Princeton and a longtime friend
and colleague of Dr. Nashs who died in 2014, once said, I think honestly that there have
been really not that many great ideas in the 20th century in economics, and maybe, among the
top 10, his equilibrium would be among them. A University of Chicago economist, Roger
Myerson, went further, comparing the impact of the Nash equilibrium on economics to that
of the discovery of the DNA double helix in the biological sciences.
Photo
Dr. Nash and his wife, Alicia, in Paris in 1960. By then, mental illness had begun to take its
toll on him. Though the couple divorced in 1963, she stood by him, and they later remarried.
Dr. Nash also made contributions to pure mathematics that many mathematicians view as
more significant than his Nobel-winning work on game theory. In one he solved an
intractable problem in differential geometry derived from the work of the 19th century
mathematician G. F. B. Riemann.
His achievements were the more remarkable, colleagues said, for being presented in papers
published before he was 30.
Jane Austen wrote six novels, said Barry Mazur, a professor of mathematics at Harvard
who was a freshman at M.I.T. when Dr. Nash taught there. I think Nashs pure mathematical
contributions are on that level. Very, very few papers he wrote on different subjects, but the
ones that had impact had incredible impact.
To a wider audience Dr. Nash was probably best known for his life story, one of dazzling
achievement, devastating loss and almost miraculous redemption. The tale of Dr. Nashs
brilliant rise, the years lost to schizophrenia, his return to rationality and his receiving the
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences retold in a biography by Sylvia Nasar and in
the Oscar-winning film, which also starred Jennifer Connelly as Alicia Nash captured the

public mind as a portrait of the destructive force of mental illness and the stigma that can
hound those who suffer from it.
Arrogant, Ambitious and Odd
John Forbes Nash was born on June 13, 1928, in Bluefield, W.Va. His father, John Sr., was an
electrical engineer. His mother, Margaret, was a Latin teacher.
As a child, John Nash may have been a prodigy, but he was not a sterling student, Ms. Nasar
noted in a 1994 article in The New York Times. He read constantly. He played chess. He
whistled entire Bach melodies, she wrote.
In high school he stumbled across E. T. Bells book Men of Mathematics, and soon
demonstrated his own mathematical skill by independently proving a classic Fermat theorem,
an accomplishment he recalled in an autobiographical essay written for the Nobel committee.
Intending to become an engineer like his father, he entered Carnegie Mellon University (then
called Carnegie Institute of Technology) in Pittsburgh. But he chafed at the regimentation of
the coursework and switched to mathematics, encouraged by professors who recognized his
mathematical genius.
Receiving his bachelors and masters degrees from Carnegie, he arrived at Princeton in
1948. It was a time of great expectations, when American children still dreamed of growing
up to be physicists like Einstein or mathematicians like the brilliant Hungarian-born polymath
John von Neumann, both of whom attended the afternoon teas at Fine Hall, the home of the
math department.
John Nash, tall and good-looking, became known for his intellectual arrogance, his odd habits
he paced the halls, walked off in the middle of conversations and whistled incessantly
and his fierce ambition, his colleagues have recalled.
Photo
Russell Crowe as Dr. Nash in A Beautiful Mind, which won the Oscar for best picture.
Credit Eli Reed/Universal Studios
He invented a game, known as Nash, that became an obsession in the Fine Hall common
room. (The same game, invented independently in Denmark, was later sold by Parker
Brothers as Hex.) He also took on a problem left unsolved by Dr. von Neumann and Oskar
Morgenstern, the pioneers of game theory, in their now-classic book, Theory of Games and
Economic Behavior.
Dr. von Neumann and Dr. Morgenstern, an economist at Princeton, primarily addressed socalled zero-sum games, in which one players gain is anothers loss. But most real-world
interactions are more complicated; players interests are not directly opposed, and there are
opportunities for mutual gain. Dr. Nashs solution, contained in a 27-page doctoral thesis he
wrote when he was 21, provided a way of predicting the possible outcome of a game with
multiple players, in which each was acting to maximize self-interest.

This deceptively simple extension of game theory paved the way for economic theory to be
applied to an array of situations besides the marketplace.
It was a very natural discovery, Dr. Kuhn said. A variety of people would have come to
the same results at the same time, but John did it and he did it on his own.
Brilliance Turns Malignant
After receiving his doctorate at Princeton, Dr. Nash worked as a consultant to the RAND
Corporation and as an instructor at M.I.T. while continuing to attack problems that no one
else could solve. On a dare, he developed an entirely original approach to a longstanding
problem in differential geometry, showing that abstract geometric spaces called Riemannian
manifolds could be squished into arbitrarily small pieces of Euclidean space.
As his career flourished and his reputation grew, however, Dr. Nashs personal life became
increasingly complex. A turbulent romance in Boston with a nurse, Eleanor Stier, resulted in
the birth of a son, John David Stier, in 1953. Dr. Nash also had a series of relationships with
men, and while at RAND in the summer of 1954 he was arrested in a mens bathroom for
indecent exposure, according to Ms. Nasars biography. And doubts about his
accomplishments gnawed at him: Two of mathematics highest honors, the Putnam
Competition and the Fields Medal, had eluded him.
In 1957, after two years of on-and-off courtship, he married Alicia Larde, an M.I.T. physics
major from an aristocratic Central American family and one of only 16 women in the class of
1955.
He was very, very good looking, very intelligent, Ms. Nash told Ms. Nasar. It was a little
bit of a hero-worship thing.
But early in 1959, with his wife pregnant with their son, John, Dr. Nash began to unravel. His
brilliance turned malignant, leading him into a landscape of paranoia and delusion, and in
April he was hospitalized at McLean Hospital, outside Boston, sharing the psychiatric ward
with, among others, the poet Robert Lowell.
It was the first step of a steep decline. There were more hospitalizations. Dr. Nash was
injected with insulin and fled for a while to Europe, sending cryptic postcards to colleagues
and family members. For many years he roamed the Princeton campus, a lonely figure
scribbling unintelligible formulas on the same blackboards in Fine Hall on which he had once
demonstrated startling mathematical feats.

More Reporting on Mathematics

Though game theory was gaining in prominence, and his work cited ever more frequently and
taught widely in economics courses around the world, Dr. Nash had vanished from the
professional world.
He hadnt published a scientific paper since 1958, Ms. Nasar wrote in the 1994 Times
article. He hadnt held an academic post since 1959. Many people had heard, incorrectly,

that he had had a lobotomy. Others, mainly those outside of Princeton, simply assumed that
he was dead.
Indeed, Dr. Myerson recalled in a telephone interview that one scholar who wrote to Dr. Nash
in the 1980s to ask permission to reprint an article received the letter back with one sentence
scrawled across it: You may use my article as if I were dead.
Reaching a Watershed
Still, Dr. Nash was fortunate in having family members, colleagues and friends who protected
him, got him work and in general helped him survive. Ms. Nash divorced him in 1963, but
continued to stand by him, taking him into her house to live in 1970. (The couple married a
second time in 2001.)
Ms. Nash supported her ex-husband and her son by working as a computer programmer, with
some financial help from family, friends and colleagues.
By the early 1990s, when the Nobel committee began investigating the possibility of
awarding Dr. Nash its memorial prize in economics, his illness had quieted. He later said that
he had simply decided that he was going to return to rationality. I emerged from irrational
thinking, ultimately, without medicine other than the natural hormonal changes of aging, he
wrote in an email to Dr. Kuhn in 1996.
Colleagues, including Dr. Kuhn, helped persuade the Nobel committee that Dr. Nash was
well enough to accept the prize he shared it with two economists, John C. Harsanyi of the
University of California at Berkeley, and Reinhard Selten of the Rheinische FriedrichWilhelms University in Bonn, Germany and they defended him when some questioned
giving the prize to a man who had suffered from a serious mental disorder.
The Nobel, the publicity that attended it and the making of the film were a watershed in his
life, Dr. Kuhn said of Dr. Nash. It changed him from a homeless unknown person who was
wandering around Princeton to a celebrity, and financially it put him on a much better basis.
Dr. Nash is survived by his sons, John David Stier and John Charles Martin Nash, and a
sister, Martha Nash Legg.
He continued to work, traveling and speaking at conferences and trying to formulate a new
theory of cooperative games. Friends described him as charming and diffident, socially
awkward, a little quiet, with scant trace of the arrogance of his youth.
You dont find many mathematicians approaching things this way now, barehandedly
attacking a problem, the way Dr. Nash did, Dr. Mazur said.
Correction: May 24, 2015
An earlier version of this obituary misidentified the poet with whom Dr. Nash spent time in
the psychiatric ward at McLean Hospital. It was Robert Lowell, not Ezra Pound. Because of
an editing error, the earlier version also misstated the title of a book by E.T. Bell. It is Men
of Mathematics, not Men and Mathematics.

Correction: June 12, 2015

An obituary on May 25 about the mathematician John Nash referred incorrectly to treatment
he received during one of his hospitalizations. He received insulin shock therapy, not
electroshock therapy. The obituary also described imprecisely the book Theory of Games
and Economic Behavior, by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, which included a
problem that Dr. Nash solved. That book primarily addressed so-called zero-sum games; it
did not solely address such games. And because of an editing error, the obituary misidentified
the prize Dr. Nash shared in 1994. It was the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences,
not the Nobel Prize.
Michael Schwirtz and Ashley Southall contributed reporting.
A version of this article appears in print on May 25, 2015, on page A1 of the New York
edition with the headline: John Nash, 86, Math Genius Defined by a Beautiful Mind, Dies.
Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Continue reading the main story

Related Coverage
1.

Explaining a Cornerstone of Game Theory: John

Nashs Equilibrium MAY 24, 2015

2.

The Wisdom of a Beautiful Mind MAY 24, 2015

What's Next
Loading...
Go to Home Page

Site Index The New York Times

Site Index Navigation
News

World

U.S.

Politics

N.Y.

Business

Tech

Science

Health

Sports

Education

Obituaries

Today's Paper

Corrections

Opinion

Today's Opinion

Op-Ed Columnists

Editorials

Contributing Writers

Op-Ed Contributors

Opinionator

Letters

Sunday Review

Taking Note

Room for Debate

Public Editor

Video: Opinion

Arts

Today's Arts

Art & Design

Books

Dance

Movies

Music

N.Y.C. Events Guide

Television

Theater

Video: Arts

Living

Automobiles

Crossword

Food

Education

Fashion & Style

Health

Jobs

Magazine

N.Y.C. Events Guide

Real Estate

T Magazine

Travel

Weddings & Celebrations

Listings & More

Classifieds

Tools & Services

Times Topics

Public Editor

N.Y.C. Events Guide

Blogs

Multimedia

Photography

Video

NYT Store

Times Journeys

Subscribe

Manage My Account

Subscribe

Home Delivery

Digital Subscriptions

Times Insider

Crossword

Email Newsletters

Alerts

Gift Subscriptions

Corporate Subscriptions

Education Rate

Mobile Applications

Replica Edition

Site Information Navigation

2016 The New York Times Company

Home

Search

Accessibility concerns? Email us at accessibility@nytimes.com. We would love to

hear from you.

Contact Us

Work With Us

Advertise

Your Ad Choices

Privacy

Terms of Service

Terms of Sale

Site Information Navigation

Site Map

Help

Site Feedback

Subscriptions