John Forbes Nash Jr.

He was an engineer's son from Bluefield, West Virginia, taught partly out of books his parents and grandparents handed him and sent to a local college for advanced mathematics while he was still in high school. A Westinghouse scholarship took him to Carnegie Tech, where he started in chemical engineering, moved to chemistry, and was pushed into mathematics by a professor who could see what he was. He finished a bachelor's degree and a master's in the same year. His Carnegie adviser then wrote him a recommendation that ran to one sentence: he is a mathematical genius. Harvard, Chicago and Michigan all offered him places. He went to Princeton because the department chairman there offered a named fellowship, and because it was nearer home.

The Princeton dissertation of 1950 was called Non-Cooperative Games, and the idea inside it — that a set of strategies can be stable when no player gains by moving alone — became a standard instrument in economics, biology and political science. It was nearly three decades before the profession gave him a prize for it. In the same period he proved the embedding theorems, showing that an abstract Riemannian manifold can be realized as a surface sitting in ordinary space, and he and Ennio De Giorgi, working separately and by different methods, settled Hilbert's nineteenth problem, open for almost 60 years. Between 1945 and 1996 he published 23 papers. Late in life he argued for an ideal money pegged to an index of industrial consumption and against letting central banks manage currency, a position he noted ran close to Hayek's.

In 1954 the police in Santa Monica ran a sting on gay men and arrested him for indecent exposure. The charge was dropped, and he lost his security clearance and his consulting work at RAND anyway. He had already left a nurse named Eleanor Stier when she told him she was pregnant with his son. Five years later the delusions arrived. He mailed letters to embassies in Washington announcing that he was forming a government and signed them Emperor of Antarctica, and he stood up at Columbia to present a proof of the Riemann hypothesis and said things that told the room at once that something was wrong. He resigned from MIT that spring, was committed repeatedly over the next nine years, and was given antipsychotics and insulin shock therapy. After 1970 he took no medication at all.

For years at Princeton he was the Phantom of Fine Hall, leaving equations on blackboards overnight. Email brought him back. By the late 1980s working mathematicians realized the man writing to them was that John Nash, and that group assured the Nobel committee he was well enough to take the prize in 1994. Sylvia Nasar's biography followed in 1998 and Ron Howard's film in 2001, which won Best Picture and got the recovery wrong — it implies medication saved him, and Nash said the screenwriter feared it would stop people taking their pills. On May 19, 2015, he took the Abel Prize. Four days later a taxi carrying him and Alicia home from Newark Airport hit a guardrail and killed them.

John Forbes Nash Jr.'s life against the full span of the corpus.

• The Bargaining Problem article
  Published in Econometrica, and the origin of the Nash bargaining solution 1950
• Equilibrium Points in n-Person Games article
  A page and a half in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 1950
• Non-Cooperative Games article
  The Annals of Mathematics version of the Princeton dissertation 1951
• The Imbedding Problem for Riemannian Manifolds article
  The second and harder of the embedding theorems 1956
• Continuity of Solutions of Parabolic and Elliptic Equations article
  The paper that settled Hilbert's nineteenth problem, alongside Ennio De Giorgi's 1958
• Ideal Money article
  His late argument for a currency pegged to an industrial consumption index 2002

• 1948 aged ~20 Finishes a bachelor's and a master's at Carnegie Tech in the same year His adviser's recommendation letter read, in full, that he is a mathematical genius.
• 1950 aged ~22 Submits the Princeton dissertation that defines the Nash equilibrium
• 1954 aged ~26 Arrested in a Santa Monica sting and fired by RAND The indecent exposure charge was dropped. His top-secret clearance was not restored.
• 1958 aged ~30 Settles Hilbert's nineteenth problem, independently of Ennio De Giorgi
• April 1959 aged 30 Admitted to McLean Hospital and diagnosed with schizophrenia He resigned his tenured MIT position that spring.
• 1970 aged ~42 Leaves hospital for the last time and stops taking medication He moved into his former wife's house as a boarder and was never committed again.
• 1994 aged ~66 Shares the Nobel Memorial Prize with John Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten Mathematicians who had reconnected with him by email vouched for his health to the committee.
• May 19, 2015 aged 86 Receives the Abel Prize in Oslo with Louis Nirenberg
• May 23, 2015 aged 86 Killed with Alicia in a taxi crash on the New Jersey Turnpike Neither was wearing a seatbelt. They were on the way home from Newark Airport.

• John von Neumann 1903–1957
  Hungarian-American mathematician and engineer whose computer architecture remains the basis of modern computing. extended his game theory
• Kenneth Arrow 1921–2017
  Economist whose impossibility theorem and work on general equilibrium, risk, and information reshaped modern economic theory. shared the field his equilibrium remade
• Paul Samuelson 1915–2009
  First American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics, whose textbook defined the field for decades. MIT colleague
• Norbert Wiener 1894–1964
  Mathematician who founded cybernetics, influencing computing, automation, neuroscience, and theories of communication and control. MIT mathematics contemporary
• Albert Einstein 1879–1955
  German-American theoretical physicist whose theory of relativity revolutionized modern physics. Princeton contemporary