On June 13, 1928, John Nash was born in West Virginia. If life was a zero-sum game, that would have meant that somebody else would have died at the same moment, but luckily for everybody, life is more like an n-player non-zero-sum non-cooperative game that instead has a Nash equilibrium in mixed strategies. Yeah, that’s the same Nash.
John Nash didn’t invent game theory, but he advanced it probably more than anybody. His various formulations are the Nash bargaining game, Nash embedding theorem, Nash inequality, the Nash theorem, the Nash-Moser theorem, and a whole set of Nash functions, which have to do with algebraic geometry. If you’re looking for explanations of this stuff, you’ll have to look elsewhere. I only ever took one stinkin’ class in game theory, and it never mentioned most of these.
Nash was recognized as brilliant quite early, and was taking college classes while still in high school. He graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with both BS and MS degrees in math when he was just 20, and his advisor wrote a letter of recommendation to PhD programs, describing Nash as “a mathematical genius.” He was offered positions at Harvard and other top schools, but chose Princeton because it was closer to home and they offered him the best fellowship.
He never published a great deal, but nearly every paper he did publish turned out to be a landmark. He also wrote letters, as early as the 1950s, that were classified by the NSA, and when they were finally made public in 2011 showed that Nash had anticipated most of modern cryptography.
Nash had a long history of mental illness, and was diagnosed with schizophrenia in the late 50s. He was hospitalized at various times, but eventually managed to largely recover by living quietly in the Princeton math community, where they didn’t mind eccentricities (at least they didn’t mind as long as you were a genius). He won both the John von Neumann Prize and the Nobel Prize, and collected a long list of honorary doctorates. And then, of course, he was the subject of the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind, based on his 1998 biography (same title). And now…back to the game, everyone!
