![\"John](\"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/05\/25NASH1-obit-master675-john.jpg\")
<\/a>John F. Nash Jr. at his Princeton graduation in 1950, when he received his doctorate.<\/p><\/div>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The Nashes were returning home from the airport after a trip to Norway, where Dr. Nash and Louis Nirenberg<\/a>, a mathematician from New York University, had received the Abel Prize<\/a> from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p><\/div>\n 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 Princeton\u2019s doctoral program in math said simply, \u201cThis man is a genius.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cJohn\u2019s remarkable achievements inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and scientists,\u201d the president of Princeton, Christopher L. Eisgruber, said on Sunday, \u201cand the story of his life with Alicia moved millions of readers and moviegoers, who marveled at their courage in the face of daunting challenges.\u201d<\/p>\n Russell Crowe, who portrayed Dr. Nash in the 2001 film adaptation of \u201cA Beautiful Mind,\u201d posted on Twitter<\/a> that he was \u201cstunned\u201d by the deaths. \u201cAn amazing partnership,\u201d he wrote. \u201cBeautiful minds, beautiful hearts.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr. Nash\u2019s 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\u2019s approach is now pervasive in economics and throughout the social sciences and applied in other fields as well, including evolutionary biology.<\/p>\n John Nash<\/p><\/div>\n Harold W. Kuhn<\/a>, an emeritus professor of mathematics at Princeton and a longtime friend and colleague of Dr. Nash\u2019s who died in 2014, once said, \u201cI 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.\u201d A University of Chicago economist, Roger Myerson<\/a>, went further, comparing the impact of the Nash equilibrium on economics \u201cto that of the discovery of the DNA double helix in the biological sciences.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n His achievements were the more remarkable, colleagues said, for being presented in papers published before he was 30.<\/p>\n \u201cJane Austen wrote six novels,\u201d said Barry Mazur, a professor of mathematics at Harvard who was a freshman at M.I.T. when Dr. Nash taught there. \u201cI think Nash\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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. Nash\u2019s brilliant rise, the years lost to schizophrenia, his return to rationality and his receiving the Nobel \u2014 retold in a biography by Sylvia Nasar<\/a> and in the Oscar-winning film, which also starred <\/a>Jennifer Connelly as Alicia Nash \u2014 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.<\/p>\n Arrogant, Ambitious and Odd<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n As a child, John Nash may have been a prodigy, but he was not a sterling student, Ms. Nasar noted in a 1994 article<\/a> in The New York Times. \u201cHe read constantly. He played chess. He whistled entire Bach melodies,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n In high school he stumbled across E. T. Bell\u2019s book \u201cMen of Mathematics<\/a>,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Receiving his bachelor\u2019s and master\u2019s 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<\/a>, both of whom attended the afternoon teas at Fine Hall, the home of the math department.<\/p>\n John Nash, tall and good-looking, became known for his intellectual arrogance, his odd habits \u2014 he paced the halls, walked off in the middle of conversations and whistled incessantly \u2014 and his fierce ambition, his colleagues have recalled.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.) 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, \u201cTheory of Games and Economic Behavior<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr. von Neumann and Dr. Morgenstern, an economist at Princeton, addressed only so-called zero-sum games, in which one player\u2019s gain is another\u2019s loss. But most real-world interactions are more complicated; players\u2019 interests are not directly opposed, and there are opportunities for mutual gain. Dr. Nash\u2019s solution, contained in a 27-page doctoral thesis<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n This deceptively simple extension of game theory paved the way for economic theory to be applied to an array of situations besides the marketplace.<\/p>\n Russell Crowe as Dr. Nash in \u201cA Beautiful Mind,\u201d which won the Oscar for best picture. Credit Eli Reed\/Universal Studios<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cIt was a very natural discovery,\u201d Dr. Kuhn said. \u201cA 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Brilliance Turns Malignant<\/strong><\/p>\n 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<\/a> could be squished into arbitrarily small pieces of Euclidean space.<\/p>\n As his career flourished and his reputation grew, however, Dr. Nash\u2019s 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 men\u2019s bathroom for indecent exposure, according to Ms. Nasar\u2019s biography. And doubts about his accomplishments gnawed at him: Two of mathematics\u2019 highest honors, the Putnam Competition and the Fields Medal, had eluded him.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was very, very good looking, very intelligent,\u201d Ms. Nash told Ms. Nasar. \u201cIt was a little bit of a hero-worship thing.\u201d<\/p>\n 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n It was the first step of a steep decline. There were more hospitalizations. Dr. Nash 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 on which he had once demonstrated startling mathematical feats.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cHe hadn\u2019t published a scientific paper since 1958,\u201d Ms. Nasar wrote in the 1994 Times article. \u201cHe hadn\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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: \u201cYou may use my article as if I were dead.\u201d<\/p>\n Reaching a \u2018Watershed\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n 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.)<\/p>\n Ms. Nash supported her ex-husband and her son by working as a computer programmer, with some financial help from family, friends and colleagues.<\/p>\n 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. \u201cI emerged from irrational thinking, ultimately, without medicine other than the natural hormonal changes of aging,\u201d he wrote in an email to Dr. Kuhn in 1996.<\/p>\n Colleagues, including Dr. Kuhn, helped persuade the Nobel committee that Dr. Nash was well enough to accept the prize \u2014 he shared it with two economists, John C. Harsanyi<\/a> of the University of California at Berkeley, and Reinhard Selten<\/a> of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn, Germany \u2014 and they defended him when some questioned giving the prize to a man who had suffered from a serious mental disorder.<\/p>\n The Nobel, the publicity that attended it and the making of the film were \u201ca watershed in his life,\u201d Dr. Kuhn said of Dr. Nash. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n Dr. Nash is survived by his sons, John David Stier and John Charles Martin Nash, and a sister, Martha Nash Legg.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t find many mathematicians approaching things this way now, barehandedly attacking a problem,\u201d the way Dr. Nash did, Dr. Mazur said.<\/p>\n __________________________________<\/p>\n Correction: May 24, 2015<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n An earlier version of this obituary misstated the title of a book by E.T. Bell. It is \u201cMen of Mathematics,\u201d not \u201cMen and Mathematics.\u201d It also misstated the poet with whom Dr. Nash spent time in the psychiatric ward at McLean Hospital. It was Robert Lowell, not Ezra Pound. <\/em><\/p>\n Michael Schwirtz and Ashley Southall contributed reporting.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a>