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#14560239
John F. Nash Jr., a mathematician who shared a Nobel Prize in 1994 for work that greatly extended the reach and power of modern economic theory and whose decades-long descent into severe mental illness and eventual recovery were the subject of a book and a 2001 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 when the driver lost control while trying to pass another car and hit a guard rail and another vehicle, said Sgt. Gregory Williams of the New Jersey State Police.

The couple were ejected from the cab and pronounced dead at the scene. The taxi driver and the driver of the other car were treated for non-life threatening injuries. No criminal charges have been filed.

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 few others dared tackle them. A one-sentence letter written in support of his application to Princeton’s doctoral program in math said simply, “This man is a genius.”

“John’s remarkable achievements inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and scientists,’’ the president of Princeton, Christopher L. Eisgruber, said, “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 “A Beautiful Mind,” tweeted that he was “stunned,” by his death. “An amazing partnership,” he wrote. “Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts.”

Dr. Nash’s 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. Nash’s approach is now pervasive in economics and throughout the social sciences and is applied routinely in other fields, like evolutionary biology.

Harold W. Kuhn, an emeritus professor of mathematics at Princeton and a longtime friend and colleague of Dr. Nash’s who died in 2014, 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.” An economist, Roger Myerson of the University of Chicago, went further, comparing the impact of Nash equilibrium on economics “to that of the discovery of the DNA double helix in the biological sciences.”

Dr. Nash also made contributions to pure mathematics that many mathematicians view as more significant than his Nobel-winning work on game theory, including solving 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 contained in a small handful of papers published before he was 30.


“Jane Austen wrote six novels, Bach wrote six partitas,” said Barry Mazur, a professor of mathematics at Harvard who was a freshman at M.I.T. when Dr. Nash taught there. “I think Nash’s 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.”

Yet to a wider audience, Dr. Nash was probably best known for his life story, a tale of dazzling achievement, devastating loss and almost miraculous redemption. The narrative of Dr. Nash’s brilliant rise, the lost years when his world dissolved in schizophrenia, his return to rationality and the awarding of the Nobel, retold in a biography by Sylvia Nasar and in the Oscar-winning film starring Russell Crowe, captured the public mind and became a symbol of the destructive force of mental illness and the stigma that often hounds those who suffer from it.

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 schoolteacher.

As a child, John Nash may have been a prodigy but he was not a sterling student, Sylvia Nasar noted in a 1994 article in The New York Times. “He read constantly. He played chess. He whistled entire Bach melodies,” Ms. Nasar wrote.

In high school, he stumbled across E.T. Bell’s book, “Men of Mathematics,” and soon demonstrated his own mathematical skill by independently proving Fermat’s classic 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 (then called Carnegie Institute of Technology). But he chafed at the regimented courses, and encouraged by professors who recognized his mathematical genius, he switched to mathematics.

Receiving his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Carnegie, he arrived at Princeton in 1948, 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, quickly became known for his intellectual arrogance, his odd habits — he paced the halls, walked off in the middle of conversations, whistled incessantly — and his fierce ambition, his colleagues have recalled.

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, addressed only so-called zero-sum games, in which one player’s gain is another’s loss. But most real world interactions are more complicated, where players’ interests are not directly opposed, and there are opportunities for mutual gain. Dr. Nash’s solution, contained in a 27-page doctoral thesis he wrote when he was 21, provided a way of analyzing how each player could maximize his benefits, assuming that the other players would also act to maximize their self-interest.


This deceptively simple extension of game theory paved the way for economic theory to be applied to a wide variety of other 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.”

After receiving his doctorate at Princeton, Dr. Nash served as a consultant for the RAND Corporation and as an instructor at M.I.T. and still had a penchant for attacking 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. Nash’s personal life became increasingly complex. A turbulent romance with a nurse in Boston, 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 men’s bathroom for indecent exposure, according to Ms. Nasar’s biography. And doubts about his accomplishments gnawed at him: two of mathematics’ highest honors, the Putnam prize 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. But early in 1959, with Alicia 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 Ezra Pound.

It was the first step of a steep decline. There were more hospitalizations. He underwent electroshock therapy 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 where he had once demonstrated startling mathematical feats.

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 hadn’t published a scientific paper since 1958,” Ms. Nasar wrote in the 1994 Times article. “He hadn’t 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.”

Still, Dr. Nash was fortunate in having family members, colleagues and friends, in Princeton and elsewhere, who protected him, got him occasional money and work, and in general helped him survive. Alicia 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.)


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 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 Friedrich-Wilhelms 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 continued to work, traveling and speaking at conferences and attempting, among other things, to formulate a new theory of cooperative games. Friends described him as charming and diffident, a bit socially awkward, a little quiet, with scant trace of the arrogance of his youth.

“You don’t find many mathematicians approaching things this way now, bare-handedly attacking a problem,” the way Dr. Nash did, said Dr. Mazur.


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/25/scien ... .html?_r=0


Or... Was he killed for knowing too much?

I guess it's time for me to move on, take down the many posters of Nash I have hanging in my study.

Thoughts?
#14560292
May his tortured mind rest in peace. I'm sorry, but I think it's a bit ridiculous to think of Nash as what was portrayed in the hollywood blockbuster. That's all that the media seems to be doing with his death, and I don't think that's fair really. If you watch any actual interviews with the guy himself, he's the first to admit that his selfishness celebratory game theory was most likely the makings of his paranoid schizophrenic episodes. It's unfortunate that greedy economists exalted this as a way to justify their selfishness in raping the economy/society with neoliberalism/free market fundamentalism.
By Rich
#14560331
Solastalgia wrote:It's unfortunate that greedy economists exalted this as a way to justify their selfishness in raping the economy/society with neoliberalism/free market fundamentalism.
Free market fundamentalism, what in Gods name are you talking about? In the nineteen century non military government expenditure was probably less than 2% of GDP. Today in western countries its between 35 and 45%. The amount of regulation of business has probably increased a hundred fold. What kind of warped demented view sees the current set up as free market fundamentalism.
#14560343
Free market fundamentalism, what in Gods name are you talking about? In the nineteen century non military government expenditure was probably less than 2% of GDP. Today in western countries its between 35 and 45%. The amount of regulation of business has probably increased a hundred fold. What kind of warped demented view sees the current set up as free market fundamentalism.

Precisely. The heyday of free market fundamentalism was back in the early 19th century, in Britain and America in particular. It led, of course, to things like the Irish Famine, which was exacerbated by the free market and free trade fanaticism of the British ruling class of the time. Even at the height of the Famine, food was being exported from Ireland to be sold abroad to make more profits for the ruling class. It also led to the increasingly savage swings between boom and bust which characterised capitalism in the 19th century. Things became so bad that government intervention in the free market became a vital necessity if a violent proletarian revolution was to be avoided. By the mid-20th century, this government intervention had stabilised the political and social system; so much so that most people came to believe that such stability was normal for capitalism. It wasn't, and it isn't.
#14560496
Solastalgia wrote: It's unfortunate that greedy economists exalted this as a way to justify their selfishness in raping the economy/society with neoliberalism/free market fundamentalism.

Game theory has also assisted in explaining unsustainable use/extraction of food and resources in constrained areas where multiple parties operate. By extension, it has also helped suggesting solutions to work around excessive use of pastures and fishing areas etc. By accepting the premise of the market economy, game theory has been able to provide measures that facilitates sustainable food production and more. Granted, all within a framework of self-interest, but it's better than tearing down the ecosystem which was harder to circumvent before.
By Sphinx
#14560499
R.I.P., beautiful mind! The movie inspired me to go to grad school. The true story of Nash and his wife is much different than the movie though.

OP wrote:when the driver lost control while trying to pass another car and hit a guard rail and another vehicle

90% chance the driver was an Egyptian.
#14560507
Potemkin wrote:It led, of course, to things like the Irish Famine, which was exacerbated by the free market and free trade fanaticism of the British ruling class of the time.

It did not, of course, lead to the Irish Famine. Famine was a common occurrence until the 20th Century, and it is still common. It's simply mitigated by redistribution programs, and leads, of course, to things like over-population. The reason for the Irish Famine is that subsistence farmers relied exclusively on potatoes, and a blight hit their crops. Some rich people didn't give a shit. Opportunistic anti-Protestants blamed it all on the British for political and religious reasons.

Nash was up there. It's a terrible way to go. At any rate, he made a first rate contribution to game theory. It's amazing that the United States became such a venal culture in his time.
#14560525
It did not, of course, lead to the Irish Famine. Famine was a common occurrence until the 20th Century, and it is still common.

I agree; what I should have said was that it led to the devastating effects of the Irish Famine. As you say, there had been regular famines in Ireland for centuries, yet none with the death toll or the demographic impact of the Irish Famine of the 1840s. The reason for this high death toll was, of course, the free market fundamentalism of the British ruling class. And this whole "not giving a shit" thing was connected to that free market fundamentalism; after all, what need do we have to intervene to save babies from starving to death if it is the ineffable will of the Invisible Hand that they starve? As Cain asked God, "Am I my brother's keeper?"

It's simply mitigated by redistribution programs, and leads, of course, to things like over-population. The reason for the Irish Famine is that subsistence farmers relied exclusively on potatoes, and a blight hit their crops. Some rich people didn't give a shit.

Actually, many of them regarded it as an excellent opportunity to rid themselves of unproductive Irish Catholic subsistence farmers, who had three strikes against them: (1) they were Irish, (2) they were Catholic, and (3) they were economically unproductive. There was clearly no place for them in the Brave New World of capitalism. The Invisible Hand had spoken. All hail the Invisible Hand!

Opportunistic anti-Protestants blamed it all on the British for political and religious reasons.

The reason why the British ruling elite did not intervene to save their lives was for political and religious reasons; it therefore made sense for the Irish nationalists to blame the British ruling class for political and religious reasons.

Nash was up there. It's a terrible way to go. At any rate, he made a first rate contribution to game theory. It's amazing that the United States became such a venal culture in his time.

Agreed, on both counts. Just goes to show.... well, okay, I don't know exactly what it goes to show, but whatever it is, it goes to show it....
#14560658
Rich wrote:Free market fundamentalism, what in Gods name are you talking about? In the nineteen century non military government expenditure was probably less than 2% of GDP. Today in western countries its between 35 and 45%. The amount of regulation of business has probably increased a hundred fold. What kind of warped demented view sees the current set up as free market fundamentalism.


You're right, up to a point. Neo-liberalism is in favor of unregulated markets, but not in favor of small government - two completely different things. The mass of today's regulations is centered on preserving market share for existing players, rather than protection of health of health and safety. The public health infrastructure, for example, has been reduced to skeletal proportions, and it is much the same story for any bureaucracy that directly applies to protecting the public. Control fraud, which played a central role in the last crash, is now completely unregulated, and is an essential part of the business plan of every major corporation.
By wat0n
#14567976
voxlashi wrote:Game theory has also assisted in explaining unsustainable use/extraction of food and resources in constrained areas where multiple parties operate. By extension, it has also helped suggesting solutions to work around excessive use of pastures and fishing areas etc. By accepting the premise of the market economy, game theory has been able to provide measures that facilitates sustainable food production and more. Granted, all within a framework of self-interest, but it's better than tearing down the ecosystem which was harder to circumvent before.


And the study of oligopolistic competition, how to break cartels up and plenty of other stuff - especially outside of topics usually thought of as being essentially economic in nature.
User avatar
By Nets
#14570681
He would come to micro theory seminars every now and then here. I can't explain it, but the dude just gave off the weirdest vibes. Crazy, crazy eyes. I don't know anyone who didn't feel incredibly uncomfortable in his presence. He has a good run though.

My favorite Nash story is that when Von Neumann was told about Nash's existence proof for Nash equilibria, his response was (to paraphrase) "wow a fixed point theorem, big fucking deal". This is back in the day when people thought cooperative rather than non-cooperative game theory was the future.

It has always pissed me off how A Beautiful Mind has one scene describing Nash equilibrium, but it isn't actually a Nash equilibrium. WTF.

It is funny when a concept becomes so prevalent that it stops being cited. Nash 1951 should be the most cited (economics) paper of all time, but people don't cite it anymore for obvious reasons. This happens with other stuff too, Benveniste-Scheinkman in macro, for example.
By Sphinx
#14571144
Nets wrote:It has always pissed me off how A Beautiful Mind has one scene describing Nash equilibrium, but it isn't actually a Nash equilibrium.

So what is Nash's equilibrium in this case?
User avatar
By Nets
#14574382
I dunno. But it exists in mixed strategies.
#14574387
blackjack21 wrote:It did not, of course, lead to the Irish Famine. Famine was a common occurrence until the 20th Century, and it is still common.

It did lead to the Irish famine. The potato blight had swept across Europe before reaching Ireland. The British can't be blamed for the potato blight but they can be held responsible for it resulting in the Irish famine by creating a situation where the local population had become so dependant on this single food source. All types of wheat's vegetables and livestock where produced in Ireland at the time but as Potemkin pointed out it was all destined for the ports even as the Irish were dropping dead by the roadsides.

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