source: sciencepenguin

John Forbes Nash, Jr. (born June 13, 1928) is an American mathematician whose works in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations have provided insight into the forces that govern chance and events inside complex systems in daily life. His theories are used in market economics, computing,evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, accounting, politics and military theory. Serving as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton University during the latter part of his life, he shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi.

Nash is the subject of the Hollywood movie A Beautiful Mind. The film, loosely based on the biography of the same name, focuses on Nash’s mathematical genius and struggle with schizophrenia.

In 2002, PBS produced a documentary about Nash titled A Brilliant Madness, which tells the story of a mathematical genius whose career was cut short by severe mental health problems. In his own words, he states,

″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 problème de Cauchy pour les équations différentielles d’un fluide général”; 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 60′s 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.″

EARLY LIFE

Nash was born on June 13, 1928, in Bluefield, West Virginia. His father, after whom he is named, was an electrical engineer for the Appalachian Electric Power Company. His mother, born Margaret Virginia Martin and known as Virginia, had been a schoolteacher before she married. He had a younger sister, Martha, born November 16, 1930. Nash attended kindergarten and public school. His parents and grandparents provided books and encyclopedias that he learned from. Nash’s grandmother played piano at home, and Nash had positive memories of listening to her when he visited. 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. Nash attended Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) with a full scholarship, theGeorge Westinghouse Scholarship and initially majored in Chemical Engineering. He switched to Chemistry, and eventually to Mathematics. After graduating in 1948 with bachelor of science and master of science degrees in mathematics, he accepted a scholarship to Princeton University where he pursued his graduate studies in Mathematics.

Nash’s advisor and former Carnegie Tech professor R.J. Duffin wrote a letter of recommendation consisting of a single sentence: “This man is a genius.” Nash was accepted by Harvard University, but the chairman of the mathematics department of Princeton, Solomon Lefschetz, offered him the John S. Kennedy fellowship, which was enough to convince Nash that Harvard valued him less. Nash also considered Princeton more favorably because of its geographic location much closer to his family in Bluefield. He went to Princeton where he worked on his equilibrium theory.

Game theory

Nash earned a doctorate in 1950 with a 28-page dissertation on non-cooperative games. The thesis, which was written under the supervision of Albert W. Tucker, contained the definition and properties of what would later be called the “Nash equilibrium”. It’s a crucial concept in non-cooperative games, and won Nash the Nobel prize in economics in 1994.

Nash did ground-breaking work in the area of real algebraic geometry:

“Real algebraic manifolds”. Annals of Mathematics (56): 405–21. 1952., MR0050928. See Proc. Internat. Congr. Math. AMS. 1952. pp. 516–17..
His work in mathematics includes the Nash embedding theorem, which shows that any 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.

In the book A Beautiful Mind, author Sylvia Nasar explains that Nash was working on proving a theorem involving elliptic partial differential equations when, in 1956, he suffered a severe disappointment when he learned of an Italian mathematician, Ennio de Giorgi, who 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 of them had solved the problem, he would have been given theFields Medal for the proof.

In 2011, the National Security Agency declassified letters written by Nash in 1950s, in which he had proposed a new encryption-decryption machine. The letters show that Nash had anticipated many concepts of modern cryptography, which are based on computational hardness.

In 1951, Nash went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a C. L. E. Moore Instructor in the mathematics faculty. There, he met Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Lardé (born January 1, 1933), a naturalized U.S. citizen from El Salvador. De Lardé graduated from M.I.T., having majored in physics. They married in February 1957 at a Catholic ceremony, although Nash was an atheist. Nash experienced the first symptoms of mental illness in early 1959, when his wife was pregnant with their child. He resigned his position as member of the M.I.T. mathematics faculty in the spring of 1959. Nash’s wife admitted Nash to the McLean Hospital for schizophrenia in 1959; their son, John Charles Martin Nash, was born soon afterward, but remained nameless for a year because his mother felt that her husband should have a say in the name.

Nash and de Lardé divorced in 1963, though after his final hospital discharge in 1970, Nash lived in de Lardé’s house. They remarried in 2001.

Before his marriage, Nash also had a son named John David Stier from a relationship with Eleanor Stier, a nurse he met while she was caring for him as a patient. The film based on Nash’s life, A Beautiful Mind, was criticized for omitting this supposedly unsavory aspect of his life in the run-up to the 2002 Oscars, given that he was alleged to have declined marrying Eleanor based on her social status, which he thought to have been beneath his.

Nash has been a longtime resident of West Windsor Township, New Jersey.

MENTAL ILLNESS

Schizophrenia

Nash began to show signs of extreme paranoia and his wife later described his behavior as erratic, as he began speaking of characters like Charles Herman and William Parcher who were putting him in danger. 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.

He was admitted to the McLean Hospital, April–May 1959, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The clinical picture is dominated by relatively stable, often paranoid, fixed beliefs that are either false, over-imaginative or unrealistic, usually accompanied by experiences of seemingly real perception of something not actually present — particularly auditory and perceptional disturbances, a lack of motivation for life, and mild clinical depression. Upon his release, Nash resigned from MIT, withdrew his pension, and went to Europe, unsuccessfully seeking political asylum in France and East Germany. He tried to renounce his U.S. citizenship. After a problematic stay in Paris and Geneva, he was arrested by the French police and deported back to the United States at the request of the U.S. government.[citation needed]

In 1961, Nash was committed to the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton. Over the next nine years, he spent periods in psychiatric hospitals, where, aside from receiving antipsychotic medications, he was administered insulin shock therapy.

Although he sometimes took prescribed medication, Nash later wrote that he only ever did so under pressure. After 1970, he was never committed to the hospital again and he refused any medication. According to Nash, the film A Beautiful Mind inaccurately implied that he was taking the new atypical antipsychotics during this period. He attributed the depiction to the screenwriter (whose mother, he notes, was a psychiatrist), who was worried about encouraging people with the disorder to stop taking their medication. Others, however, have questioned whether the fabrication obscured a key question as to whether recovery from problems like Nash’s can actually be hindered by such drugs, and Nash has said they are overrated and that the adverse effects are not given enough consideration once someone is deemedmentally ill. 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 Lardé, Nash worked in a communitarian setting where his eccentricities were accepted. De Lardé said of Nash, “it’s just a question of living a quiet life”.

Nash dates the start of what he terms “mental disturbances” to the early months of 1959 when his wife was pregnant. He has 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’” including seeing himself as a messenger or having a special function in some way, and with supporters and opponents and hidden schemers, and a feeling of being persecuted, and looking for signs representing divine revelation. Nash has suggested his delusional thinking was related to his unhappiness and his striving to feel important and be recognized, and to his characteristic way of thinking such that “I wouldn’t have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally.” He has said, “If I felt completely pressureless I don’t think I would have gone in this pattern”. He does not see a categorical distinction between terms such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Nash reports that he did not hear voices until around 1964, later engaging in a process of rejecting them. He reports that he was always taken to hospitals against his will, and only temporarily renounced his “dream-like delusional hypotheses” after being in a hospital long enough to decide to 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. However, by 1995, although he was “thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists,” he says he also felt more limited.

At Princeton, campus legend Nash became “The Phantom of Fine Hall” (Princeton’s mathematics center), a shadowy figure who would scribble arcane equations on blackboards in the middle of the night. The legend appears in a work of fiction based on Princeton life, The Mind-Body Problem, by Rebecca Goldstein.

In 1978, Nash was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize for his discovery of non-cooperative 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.

As of 2011 Nash’s recent work involves ventures in advanced game theory, including partial agency, which show that, as in his early career, he prefers 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 evolutionary psychology views about the value of human diversity and the potential benefits of apparently nonstandard behaviors or roles.

Nash has 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 has 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 has 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 notes 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.

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, an honorary doctorate in economics from the University of Antwerp in April 2007, and was keynote speaker at a conference on Game Theory. 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 became a fellow of the American Mathematical Society.
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source: dineroenimagen

Ciudad de México.- El matemático estadounidense John Forbes Nash Jr., mejor conocido como John Nash, se especializaba en la teoría de juegos, geometría diferencial y ecuaciones en derivadas parciales.

John Nash nació el 13 de junio de 1928 en Bluefield, West Virginia, Estados Unidos. Hijo de John Forbes Nash, un ingeniero eléctrico veterano de la Primera Guerra Mundial, y de Margaret Virginia Martin, graduada de la West Virginia University, fue profesora de escuela, enseñaba Inglés y Latín, llevó una infancia común y corriente, asistió a escuelas normales de Bluefield.

De acuerdo con el propio Nash, su primer acercamiento con los libros lo tuvo a iniciar la escuela primaria, cuando sus padres le dieron la Compton’s Pictured Encyclopedia, de la cual comenzó a aprender desde pequeño.

Cuando llegó al nivel medio superior leyó el libro ‘Men of Mathematics’ de E.T. Bell, donde dice que resolvió exitosamente el clásico teorema de Fermat.

Años universitarios
En junio de 1945 se matriculó en la actual Universidad Carnegie Mellon, para estudiar ingeniería química, sin embargo, un profesor notó la gran facilidad que tenía para las matemáticas, y lo convenció de especializarse en ellas. Tres años después obtuvo una beca en la Universidad de Princeton para cursar el doctorado en matemáticas.

Antes, durante su estancia en Carneige, tomó el curso ‘International Economics’, donde el resultado de esa experiencia expuso las ideas y problemas económicos que lo llevaron a elaborar el trabajo ‘The Bargaining Problem’ (El Problema de la Negociación), el cual, sería publicado posteriormente.

A los 21 años se graduó del doctorado y publicó su trabajo ‘Non-cooperative Games’. Poco tiempo después, llamó la atención de especialistas e inició su trabajo para la RAND, una institución de la Fuerza Aérea de Estados Unidos, la cual, se dedicaba a temas de estrategia.

En 1951 fue contratado por el Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) para trabajar en la facultad de matemáticas. Un año después, conoció a Eleanor Stier con quien inició una relación, Eleanor era una enfermera que lo cuidaba. Tuvieron un hijo llamado John David Stier.

Para 1954 fue despedido de la RAND, donde había trabajado como consultor.

Tiempo después, en 1954, conoció a Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Lardé, una mujer de origen salvadoreño pero naturalizada estadounidense, Alicia fue alumna suya en el MIT, y luego su esposa. Tras un año de matrimonio fue diagnosticado con esquizofrenia.

Te puede interesar: ¿Por qué fue importante John Nash para la Economía?

La esquizofrenia
John Nash regresó como instructor al MIT en 1958, pero fue hasta 1959 cuando mostró los primeros síntomas de su enfermedad. Además, Alicia ya estaba embarazada de su primer hijo. Así decidió renunciar a su puesto en el MIT, para luego internarse en el McLean Hospital y recibir tratamiento para esquizofrenia. Más tarde, su hijo John Charles Martin Nash nacería.

Nash mostraba síntomas de paranoia, y su esposa dijo que tenía un comportamiento errático. Por ejemplo, John pensaba que todos los hombres que usaban corbata roja formaban parte de una conspiración comunista en su contra.

Ya en el hospital, el diagnóstico clínico era relativamente estable, sufría de paranoia, imaginaba de más o tenía pensamientos poco realistas, experiencias de percepción real de algo que no estaba presente, falta de motivación por la vida y depresión.

Durante nueve años recibió tratamientos antipsicóticos, y también se le administró terapia de choque de insulina.

En 1963 John y Alicia se divorciaron, pero al salir del hospital en 1970, John fue a vivir a casa de Alicia como huésped. El tener estabilidad le ayudo a Nash a aprender a sobrellevar sus delirios paranoides. Dejo de tomar medicamentos y regresó a tomar clases a Princeton.

Para los años 90 siguió con su trabajo en matemáticas y tuvo la posibilidad de volver a dar clases. Además, Alicia y John reanudaron su relación y se volvieron a casar en el 2001.

Recibió el Premio Nobel de Economía en 1994, por sus aportes a la teoría de juegos y procesos de negociación, junto con Reinhard Selten y John Harsanyi.

Te puede interesar: Las frases más famosas del Nobel John Nash

En Hollywood
Sylvia Nasar publicó la novela ‘A Beautiful Mind’ en 1999, y en el 2001 se estrenó en cine la adaptación del libro. La película llevaba el mismo nombre, y estuvo dirigida por Ron Howard y Russell Crowe hizo el papel de John Nash.

Aunque según el propio Nash, la cinta presenta algunas diferencias entre lo que ocurrió y la ficción, una gran aportación de la película es que ayudó a poner más atención en todo lo que se sabe sobre la esquizofrenia.
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source: slatefr

Lauréat en 1994 du Nobel d’économie pour des travaux menés à seulement 20 ans sur la théorie des jeux, il avait vu sa vie inspirer en 2001 le film oscarisé «A Beautiful Mind», avec Russell Crowe.

Prix Nobel d’économie en 1994, le génial mathématicien John Forbes Nash, 86 ans, est mort, samedi 23 mai, dans un accident de la route. Lui et sa femme Alicia, 82 ans, ont été victimes d’un accident de taxi sur une autoroute du New Jersey.
Nash avait été nobélisé avec John Harsanyi et Reinhard Selten pour «son analyse pionnière de l’équilibre dans la théorie des jeux non-coopératifs». Dans leur livre Les Prix Nobel d’économie, Jean-Edouard Colliard et Emeline Travers expliquent que «Nash est probablement le plus, mais pas forcément le mieux, connu des Nobel. Ses travaux restent […] relativement ignorés». Un paradoxe qui s’explique par le fait que le personnage est devenu célèbre auprès du grand public grâce au film A Beautiful Mind de Ron Howard (2001), Oscar du meilleur film et du meilleur réalisateur, où il était interprété par Russell Crowe, qui a exprimé son émotion sur Twitter.

Le titre du film était inspiré d’un jugement porté sur lui par son camarade d’études Lloyd Shapley, lui-même nobélisé sur le tard, en 2012, pour ses travaux sur la théorie des jeux.

Les travaux qui ont valu le Nobel à Nash étaient très anciens, puisqu’il s’agit d’articles écrits entre 1950 et 1953 à Princeton, alors qu’il avait à peine vingt ans, dont un doctorat de mathématiques de 27 pages. Le chercheur avait été envoyé là-bas grâce à une lettre de recommandation d’un de ses professeurs qui tenait en une phrase: «Cet homme est un génie.» Il a notamment laissé son nom à l’équilibre de Nash, une situation où deux agents amenés à faire un choix, dont la situation est liée et qui connaissent les stratégies que peut adopter l’autre, arrivent rationnellement à une situation où aucun ne peut changer son choix sans dégrader sa situation personnelle. (Ce qui n’empêche pas que cette situation peut-être collectivement sous-optimale, ce qu’illustre le célèbre dilemme du prisonnier.)
«Je dois maintenant aborder la question de mon passage de la pensée scientifique rationnelle à la pensée délirante caractéristique des personnes diagnostiquées sur le plan psychiatriques comme “schizophrènes” ou “atteintes de schizophrénie paranoïaque”», écrivait Nash, avec sécheresse, dans son autobiographie publiée au moment de l’attribution du Nobel. A la fin des années 50, il a commencé à être frappé de crises de schizophrénie, qui l’ont empêché de poursuivre plus loin ses travaux, avant de revenir à la vie publique dans les années 80. Au moment de l’attribution du Nobel, la journaliste du New York Times Sylvia Nasar, qui allait écrire le livre ensuite adapté par Ron Howard, avait écrit un article passionnant et émouvant sur ses «années perdues»:
«D’une certaine façon, l’histoire de John Nash est la tragédie qui touche toute personne atteinte de schizophrénie. Incurable, débilitante et extrêmement difficile à traiter, cette maladie a des effets terrifiants sur ses victimes. Beaucoup de personnes qui en sont atteintes ne peuvent plus longtemps ressentir ou interpréter des sensations ou expérimenter un large éventail d’émotions. A la place, elles souffrent d’illusions et entendent des voix.

Mais dans le cas de John Nash, cette tragédie est venue s’ajouter à un génie précoce –et à un réseau de famille et d’amis qui le reconnaissaient, entourant de manière protectrice Nash, lui fournissant un cocon confortable quand il était malade. Il y a eu les anciens collègues qui ont tenté de le faire travailler. La sœur qui a fait des choix déchirants concernant son traitement. L’épouse loyale qui est restée à ses côtés même après leur séparation. L’économiste qui est allé débattre avec le comité Nobel du fait que la maladie mentale ne devait pas être un obstacle au prix. Princeton lui-même.

Ensemble, ils se sont assurés que Nash ne retrouve pas, comme tellement de victimes de schizophrénie, dans un hôpital public, errant sans domicile fixe ou suicidé.»
John Nash venait, ce printemps 2015, de recevoir le prix Abel pour ses travaux en mathématiques. A l’occasion de la remise du prix, il avait demandé à rencontrer le champion d’échecs Magnus Carlsen.
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source: heisede
John Nash wurde am 13. Juni 1928 in West-Virginia als Sohn eines Ingenieurs und einer Lehrerin geboren. Nachdem er die High School absolviert hatte, studierte er zunächst Chemie an einer technischen Hochschule, wechselte dann aber zur Mathematik und erhielt 1948 ein Stipendium für die Universität Princeton. 1950 promovierte er dort mit einer gerade 27 Seiten umfassenden Arbeit (PDF) über ein Thema aus der Spieltheorie.

Die Spiel- oder Entscheidungstheorie war eine Schöpfung des Mathematikers und Computerpioniers John von Neumann, der in der Nachbarschaft der Universität am Institute for Advanced Study arbeitete. Zusammen mit dem Wirtschaftswissenschaftler Oskar Morgenstern schrieb von Neumann 1944 das Grundlagenwerk “Theory of Games and Economic Behavior”. In seiner Dissertation ergänzte Nash die Theorie durch ein Gleichgewichtskonzept, das eine Analyse von wirtschaftlicher oder politischer Konkurrenz ermöglichte.

Weitere Arbeitsfelder des Mathematikers waren die Differentialgeometrie und die partiellen Differentialgleichungen. In den 1950er Jahren lehrte Nash am Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), verbrachte aber mehrere Sommer in der RAND Corporation, wo er sich geheimer Militärforschung widmete. Überliefert ist auch ein Briefwechsel mit der NSA (PDF).

1994 nahm John Nash in Stockholm den Wirtschaftsnobelpreis entgegen.
1957 heiratete John Nash eine seiner Studentinnen, die in El Salvador geborene Alicia Larde. 1959 traten die ersten Anzeichen der paranoiden Schizophrenie auf, die die folgenden Jahrzehnte seines Lebens bestimmen sollte und 1963 auch zu seiner Scheidung führte. Seine Krankengeschichte wurde später durch das Buch “A Beautiful Mind” von Silvia Nasar und den gleichnamigen Spielfilm bekannt, in dem Russell Crowe die Hauptrolle spielte. 2001 gingen John und Alicia Nash zum zweiten Mal die Ehe ein.

1994 erhielten John Nash, der amerikanische Ökonom John C. Harsanyi und der deutsche Mathematiker Reinhard Selten den Nobelpreis für Wirtschaftswissenschaften in Anerkennung ihrer Arbeiten zur Spieltheorie. 2006 sorgten Nash und Selten bei einem gemeinsamen Symposium für einen überfüllten Hörsaal in der Kölner Universität; 2010 besuchte er auch die TU Berlin. Vor sechs Tagen, am 19. Mai, überreichte der norwegische König Harald V. ihm und seinem Mathematikerkollegen Louis Nirenberg den mit 700.000 Euro dotierten Abel-Preis.
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source: canalexatas

John Forbes Nash Jr. (Bluefield, 13 de junho de 1928) é um matemático norte-americano que trabalhou com teoria dos jogos, geometria diferencial e equações diferenciais parciais, servindo como Matemático Sénior de Investigação na Universidade de Princeton. Compartilhou o Prêmio de Ciências Econômicas em Memória de Alfred Nobel de 1994 com Reinhard Selten e John Harsanyi. Nash também é conhecido por ter tido sua vida retratada no filme Uma Mente Brilhante, vencedor de 4 Óscars (indicado para 8), baseado no livro-biográfico homônimo, que apresentou seu gênio para a matemática e sua luta contra a esquizofrenia.

John Nash nasceu e foi educado no estado da Virgínia Ocidental. Seus pais foram o engenheiro eletricista John Forbes Nash e a professora de inglês e latim Virginia Margaret Martin. Em 16 de novembro de 1930 sua irmã Martha Nash nasceu. Nash sempre foi um ávido leitor da Time (revista), da Enciclopédia Compton e da Revista Life. Mais tarde conseguiu um emprego na Bluefield Daily Telegraph, um jornal diário da região.
Aos doze anos, começou a realizar algumas experiências científicas em seu quarto; nessa época, era bastante evidente seu gosto pela solidão, pois preferia fazer as coisas sozinho a estar em contato e trabalhar em grupo. Ele relacionou a rejeição social de seus colegas com piadas e superioridade intelectual, acreditando que as danças e os esportes deles eram uma distração a partir de suas experiências e estudos.
Martha, sua irmã mais nova, parece ter sido uma criança comum, enquanto que seu irmão parecia ser bem diferente das outras crianças. Ela escreveu mais tarde: “Johnny sempre foi diferente. Meus pais sabiam disso. E eles também sabiam que ele era brilhante. John sempre quis fazer as coisas a sua maneira. Minha mãe insistia para eu fazer as coisas por ele, para eu incluí-lo nas minhas amizades… mas eu não estava muito interessada em mostrar o meu estranho irmão.”
Em sua autobiografia, Nash observa que foi o livro Homens da Matemática, de Eric Temple Bell – em particular o ensaio sobre Pierre de Fermat – que o fez se interessar pela área. John assistiu às aulas do Colégio de Bluefield, enquanto na escola secundária. Mais tarde, frequentou a Universidade Carnegie Mellon, em Pittsburgh, Pensilvânia, onde estudou primeiramente engenharia química, antes de mudar para o curso de matemática. Recebeu tanto seu bacharelado quanto seu mestrado em 1948, no Instituto Carnegie.
Após sua formatura, Nash teve um emprego em White Oak (Maryland), onde trabalhou para um projecto da Marinha dos Estados Unidos, dirigido por Clifford Truesdell.
Embora tivesse sido aceito pela Universidade de Harvard, que tinha sido sua primeira escolha devido ao prestígio da instituição e pelos cursos superiores de matemática, Nash foi assediado agressivamente pelo então presidente do departamento de matemática da Universidade de Princeton, Solomon Lefschetz, cuja oferta de uma bolsa John S. Kennedy foi o bastante para convencê-lo de que Harvard valia pouco. Assim, em White Oak, partiu para a Universidade de Princeton, onde trabalhou e desenvolveu o Equilíbrio de Nash. Obteve um doutorado em 1950, com uma tese sobre os jogos não-cooperativos. A tese, escrita sob a supervisão de Albert William Tucker, continha definições e propriedades daquilo que, mais tarde, seria chamado de Equílibrio de Nash. Esses estudos levaram a três artigos: “Pontos de Equilíbrio em Jogos de N-Pessoas” “O Problema da Barganha” “Jogos Cooperativos de Duas Pessoas. Nash também desenvolveu um trabalho importante na geometria algébrica.
Seu mais famoso trabalho tem relação com a matemática pura: o teorema do encaixe de Nash.
Em 1951, Nash foi para o Instituto Tecnológico de Massachusetts como instrutor de matemática. Lá, conheceu Alicia López-Lardé de Harrison (nascida em 1 de janeiro de 1933), uma acadêmica de física de El Salvador, com quem se casou em fevereiro de 1957. Alicia enviou Nash a um hospital psiquiátrico em 1959, devido a sua esquizofrenia; seu filho, John Charles Martin Nash, nasceu pouco tempo depois deste acontecimento.
Nash e Alicia se divorciaram em 1963, mas voltaram a viver juntos em 1970, numa relação não-romântica, em que ela abrigou-o como um companheiro. O casal renovou seu relacionamento após Nash ter sido galardoado com o Prêmio de Ciências Económicas em Memória de Alfred Nobel de 1994. Casaram-se novamente em 1 de junho de 2001.

Nash começou a mostrar sinais de esquizofrenia em 1958. Nash desenvolveu um comportamento errático de acordo com Alicia. Uma vez, entrando na sala comunal do MIT, chegou na frente de seus colegas e jogando o jornal na mesa, disse que num dos artigos, seres intergaláticos tinham deixado uma mensagem em código que apenas ele era capaz de ler. Devido a sua excentricidade habitual, muitos tomaram esses primeiros sinais como brincadeiras. Mas seu quadro se agravou, chegou escreveu cartas para embaixadas em Washington, se auto intitulou “imperador da Antártica” e começou a criar diversas teorias conspiratórias. Quando ameaçou retirar todo seu dinheiro do banco e se mudar para a Europa, Alicia buscou auxilio medico. E com o consenso do MIT, foi internado no Hospital McLean (que abrigava pacientes como professores de Harvard e pessoas famosas) em 1959, quando foi diagnosticado com esquizofrenia paranóica e depressão com baixa auto-estima. Depois de uma problemática estadia em Paris e Genebra, Nash retornou a Princeton em 1960. Permaneceu dentro e fora de hospitais psiquiátricos até 1970, onde passou por tratamentos que utilizavam eletroconvulsoterapia e medicamentos antipsicóticos. Depois de 1970, à sua escolha, ele nunca mais tomou medicação antipsicótica novamente. Segundo Nasar, sua biógrafa, Nash começou a desenvolver uma recuperação gradativa com o passar do tempo.

Em 1978, foi atribuído a Nash o Prêmio Teoria John von Neumann, por suas descobertas quanto aos equilíbrios não-cooperativos, agora chamado de Equilíbrio de Nash. Ganhou também o Prêmio Leroy P. Steele em 1999.
Em 1994, como resultado de seu trabalho com a teoria dos jogos, que desenvolveu quando estudante de Princeton, recebeu o Prêmio de Ciências Económicas em Memória de Alfred Nobel (junto com dois outros estudiosos). Fez dedicatórias do prêmio a Alicia. Nash criou dois jogos populares: Hex (jogo) (criado independentemente em 1942), e So Long Sucker em 1950 com Melvin Hausner e Lloyd Shapley. Em 2010 John Nash esteve na Faculdade de Economia e Administração da Universidade de São Paulo, durante o II encontro da Sociedade Brasileira de Teoria dos Jogos em Comemoração aos 60 anos da Teoria do Equilíbrio de Nash.

OBS: Se quiserem entender mais sobre como foi sua vida com a esquizofrenia, assista o filme “Uma mente brilhante”.
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source: epubblicait

Matematico ed economista, premio Nobel per l’economia nel 1994, è stato l’inventore della cosiddetta “teoria dei giochi”. John Nash è divenuto celebre (tra i non addetti ai lavori) per l’interpretazione di Russell Crowe nel film premio Oscar “A beautiful mind”. E’ rimasto ucciso ieri, insieme alla moglie Alicia Lopez Harrison de Lardé Nash, in un incidente in taxi nel New Jersey. John Forbes Nash Junior era nato in West Virginia ed era divenuto famoso nell’ambiente scientifico per le sue teorie dei giochi e anche, purtroppo, per la sua malattia psichiatrica (schizofrenia) di cui Russell Crowe ha dato una commovente interpretazione nel film di Ron Howard, che ha vinto il premio Oscar nel 2002. Nash aveva appena ricevuto il prestigioso premio Abel: era stato a marzo in Norvegia per la cerimonia di consegna.