John Nash: the end of mathematic's beautiful mind

John Nash - www.bized.co.uk

John Forbes Nash Jr., the American mathematician immortalized in the film, A Beautiful Mind, died, along with his wife, in a car accident on May 23, 2015. He was 86 years old, and his wife Alicia Nash (nee Larde) was 82. His wife was a physics scholar, and although they divorced in 1963, they remarried in 2001.

The 2001 film, A Beautiful Mind, was “artistically” based on Nash and his paranoid schizophrenia, and based on Sylvia Nasar’s 1998 book, A Beautiful Mind. Nasar was the couple’s biographer.

Nash (1928-2015) was famous for his work at Princeton University. He was regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20^th century, primarily for his work on game theory. Game theory is used to study how people act when decision making, especially in specific situations, such as conflict, stress, and collaborative teamwork. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994. The Nobel Prize was largely for his work in the fields combining mathematics and economics. There is no Nobel Prize awarded annually for mathematics (a major flaw of the Nobel Prize that has never changed throughout its 114 year history).

Awards for mathematics do occur. Nash received the John von Neumann Theory Prize in 1978 and the American Mathematical Society’s Steele Prize for a seminal contribution to research in 1999. But they are not as prestigious as the award Nash won only a week before his death. In May the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters awarded the Abel Prize to Nash and his long time colleague Louis Nirenberg for their work on nonlinear partial differential equations (and linking them with the analysis of abstract geometric shapes). The Abel Prize is often called the Nobel Prize for Mathematics.

I studied Nash in my university days when I undertook mathematics and English together. I did my thesis on symbolic logic, but in my university mathematics courses I studied game theory. My love though was geometry. Few people study geometry in university these days (hence my book, Bardot’s Comet, in which the father, Leonardo Bari is a geometry professor). Nash’s work on partial differential equations (PDE) linking them to abstract geometric shapes includes parts of Albert Einstein’s work on the theory of relativity (linking curvature and gravity). PDE is the set of rules for translating, or modelling, the changes in systems with multiple dimensions – in a range of practical applications, such as financial markets, the economy, the flow of heat in a room, etc. Mathematicians are now using Nash and Nirenberg’s work on PDE to solve complex and complicated geometrical and space-related problems.