28/02/2018

John Forbes Nash Jr (1928-2015): A Beautiful Mind

The story of the American mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. entered people’s lives through the screens of the movie theaters, when “A Beautiful Mind,” starring Russell Crowe, debuted in 2001. In the film, the fight of the genius of numbers with schizophrenia humanized the situation that few outside the academic circle knew about.

His major contribution to the theory of differential equations may have led to the ields Medal, had his contemporary Ennio de Giorgi of Pisa not proved the same result just months earlier by different methods. Nevertheless, Nash won the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics.

In 2002, he was one of the main stars of the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Beijing, China. Invited to present one of the public lectures of ICM 2002, the American mathematician caused a commotion upon his arrival in the country. He and his wife, physicist Alicia Nash, were greeted with dozens of bouquets of flowers at the airport. The hotel they stayed in extended a huge red carpet from the lobby to the elevators for the couple, a clear expression of respect for him.

Students of all ages arrived hours earlier to secure a good spot to hear Nash’s Equilibrium author present the lecture “Studying Cooperation in Games via Agencies”.

After 13 years of this event, after coming back from Norway, where he had received the Abel Prize of the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters, Nash and his wife were killed in a traffic accident in New Jersey.