(1928)

Mathematician and Nobel laureate John Forbes Nash Jr. was born on June 14, 1928. John Nash is a mathematician who has worked in the fields of game theory and differential geometry. He shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics with two other game theorists, Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi.

There are rumors in the scientific world that John was awarded the Nobel Prize for only one of his simplest works, and many of Nash's theories are simply incomprehensible. The most interesting thing is that John Nash did not use the works of his predecessors, most he created his theories simply “from nowhere”, without using ready-made materials and theory. During his studies, John Nash even refused to attend lectures, citing the fact that he would not learn anything new there and would only lose valuable time.

After a promising start to his mathematical career, John Nash began to develop schizophrenia in his 30s, an illness that the mathematician learned about 25 years later.

John Forbes Nash Jr. was born in Bluefield, West Virginia to John Nash Sr. and Virginia Martin. His father was an electrical engineer, his mother a teacher in English. As a teenager, John spent a lot of time reading books and conducting various experiments in his room, which soon became a laboratory. At the age of 14, John Nash proved Fermat's Little Theorem without any help.

From June 1945 to June 1948, John Nash attended Carnegie Polytechnic Institute in Pittsburgh, intending to become an engineer like his father. Instead, John fell deeply in love with mathematics and had a particular interest in topics such as number theory, Diophantine equations of quantum mechanics, and relativity. Nash especially loved problem solving.

At the Carnegie Institution, Nash became interested in the “bargaining problem” that John von Neumann had left unsolved in his book The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1928).

After Pittsburgh, John Nash Jr. went to Princeton University, where he worked on the theory of equilibrium. He received his PhD in 1950 with a thesis on non-cooperative games. The dissertation contained the definition and properties of what would later be called “Nash Equilibrium,” and 44 years later it would earn him a Nobel Prize. His research on this subject led to three papers, the first, entitled "Equilibrium Points in N-Numbered Games," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) (1950), and the rest in Econometrics on the Negotiation Problem (April 1950) and “Non-cooperative games with two participants” (January 1953).

During the summer of 1950, John Nash worked for the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, where he returned for shorter periods in 1952 and 1954. In 1950-1951, Nash taught calculus courses at Princeton, studied and managed to “slope” military service. During this time, he proved Nash's theorem on regular embeddings, which is one of the most important in differential geometry about manifolds. In 1951-1952, John became a research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

At MIT, John Nash met Alicia Lard, a student from El Salvador, whom he married in February 1957. Their son, John Charles Martin (born May 20, 1959), remained nameless for a year because Alicia, due to the fact that John Nash was in a psychiatric clinic, did not want to name the child herself. Following in his parents' footsteps, John became a mathematician, but like his father, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. John Nash had another son, John David (born 19 June 1953), with Eleanor Steer, but he wanted nothing to do with them. Admittedly bisexual, Nash had relationships with men during this period.

Although Alicia and John divorced in 1963, they remarried in 1970. But according to Sylvia Nazar's biography of Nash, they lived "like two distant relatives under the same roof" until John Nash received the Nobel Prize in 1994 , then they resumed their relationship and got married on June 1, 2001.

In 1958, John Nash began to show the first signs of his mental illness. He became paranoid and was admitted to McLean Hospital in April-May 1959, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After problematic stays in Paris and Geneva, Nash returned to Princeton in 1960. He bounced around mental hospitals until 1970 and conducted research at Brandeis University from 1965 to 1967. Between 1966 and 1996, John Nash did not publish a single scientific paper. In 1978 he was awarded the John von Neumann Prize for “Equilibrium Analysis in the Theory of Non-Cooperative Games.”

John Nash's psychological condition slowly but gradually improved. His interest in mathematical problems gradually returns, and with it his ability to think logically. In addition, he became interested in programming. 1990s his genius returned. In 1994, John Nash received the Nobel Prize in Economics as a result of his work on game theory at Princeton.

Between 1945 and 1996, Nash published 23 scientific papers, plus an autobiography, Les Prix Nobel (1994).

A film called A Beautiful Mind starring Russell Crowe, released in December 2001 and directed by Ron Howard, showed some of the events from the biography of John Nash. It, (loosely) based on a biography of the same title written by Sylvia Nasar in 1999, won 4 Oscars in 2002. However, in this film, many events from John's life are embellished or even untrue, as happens in many film adaptations to create a greater effect on the public. Unlike the film, Nash's manifestations of schizophrenia did not involve deciphering newspapers for spies. In fact, it seemed to John that encrypted messages from aliens periodically appeared in newspapers, which only he could decipher. But all this is nonsense. In the film, John Nash was not cured of schizophrenia, which in turn is incurable. In real life everything is much more interesting. For thirty years, Nash was in various psychological clinics, from which he periodically escaped, but at one point John was mysteriously cured. How this happened still remains a mystery...

John Nash became widely known throughout the world thanks to the film A Beautiful Mind. This is an amazingly touching, life-affirming film, charged with faith in the power of human genius. It is He who introduces the viewer to the world of the future, where the mind works real miracles. A piercing interweaving of madness and genius in its unity and struggle. The Oscars collection is evidence of this. The game theory created by this mathematician turned the foundations of corporate business upside down. 27 pages doctoral dissertation Nash's work had the same impact on society and economics as the 21 pages of Einstein's doctoral dissertation on theoretical physics.

Adam Smith's theory, which traditionally follows the development of liberal bourgeois society, in comparison with the way John Nash studies it, looks pale, not giving a clear explanation for many modern phenomena. The above theories are related in the same way that two-dimensional geometry is only a subset of three-dimensional geometry.

Initiation

John was born on June 13, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia. At school I was not a “nerd”; I was an average student. By nature - closed, selfish.

Imagine, a future mathematician (differential geometry and game theory) did not like this subject at school. At this stage, everything about him was suspiciously average. It was as if his intellect was sleeping and waiting for a jolt. And yet he came.

At the age of 14, the teenager came across the book “Creators of Mathematics” by his compatriot Eric Bell, a mathematician and author. The book very reliably told about the lives of great mathematicians, about their motivation and contribution to progress.

What happened when he read the book? Who knows... However, it was like an initiation, after which the previously quite average “gray” schoolboy John Nash takes on the impossible and suddenly proves Fermat’s little theorem for those around him. To non-specialists, this last circumstance means little. But believe me, it was a miracle. What can it be compared to? Perhaps, it was as if a chance came along for the amateur provincial actor, and he played Hamlet superbly in the capital.

Polytechnical Institute

His father (the son duplicated his first and last name) was an educated man who worked as an electronics engineer in a commercial company. After proving Fermat's theorem, it became quite obvious to the parent that John Nash Jr. would become a scientist.

A few shiny ones research work They opened the door wide for the guy to the rather prestigious Carnegie Polytechnic Institute, where the young man first chose chemistry, then international economics, and finally became convinced of his desire to become a mathematician. The master's degrees he received corresponded to the specialty “Theoretical and Applied Mathematics.”

The recommendation given to him by teacher Richard Duffin for admission to the Institute speaks about how much his institute teachers valued him. Let us quote its text in full and verbatim: “This guy is a genius!”

Princeton University

What he didn’t know, he had only nine years left until the point when madness would cover him with a dark veil of paranoid schizophrenia from the outside world for thirty years, erase him from society, destroy his family, deprive him of his job and home.

The young man did not know all this, just as he did not know where the fine line was that separated genius and madness. He enthusiastically greeted the presentation of the new science of game theory, the brainchild of economists Oskar Morgenstern and John, and immediately began brainstorming headlong. The twenty-year-old genius managed to independently develop the fundamental tools of game theory, and at the age of 21 he completed work on the corresponding doctoral dissertation.

How could the young almost doctor of science know that 45 years later John Nash’s theory would be awarded the Nobel Prize? It will take almost half a century for society to understand: this was a breakthrough!

Job

Very early, in 1950-1953, the period of creative maturity begins for the 22-25 year old scientist. He writes several fundamental works on the so-called theory of non-zero-sum games. What it is? You will find the comment later in this article.

John Nash is a famous and successful mathematician. His place of work is very prestigious: located in Cambridge. Then luck smiles on him: contact with the Pro-Pentagon RAND Corporation. He tastes the unlimited funding of the Cold War, becoming one of America's leading experts on its conduct.

What is game theory

The contribution of game theory to modern regulation of social life is difficult to overestimate. What is society from a macroeconomics point of view? Interaction of many players. For example, aggregated: business, government, households. Even at this macro level, it is clear that each of them is pursuing its own strategy.

Businesses potentially tend to inflate their profits (squeezing out households) and minimize taxes (underpaying the government).

It is beneficial for the state to inflate taxes (suppressing small and medium-sized businesses) and reduce the level of social protection (depriving vulnerable groups of society of support).

Households are comfortable with excessive social support from the state and minimal prices for services and goods produced by business.

How can we get these Swan, Cancer and Pike to work together and dynamically pull the cart whose name is society? This is determined by game theory.

The brainchild of John Nash - non-zero sum problems

The above class of problems, when the gain of one of the parties is equal to the loss of the other, are called zero-sum problems. Both Morgenstern and Neumann knew how to calculate it. However, let us recall that for this class of problems John Nash created the tools and conceptual apparatus.

But the brilliant mathematician did not stop at this model; he substantiated a more subtle class of problems (with a non-zero sum). For example, a conflict between the administration and trade unions putting forward demands for higher wages.

By escalating the situation through a long strike, both sides will suffer losses. If both trade unions and management use the ideal strategy, both will benefit. This situation is called non-cooperative equilibrium, or Nash equilibrium. (Tasks of this kind include diplomatic problems and trade wars.)

Modern highly competitive society demonstrates a truly endless range of interactions between various subjects. Moreover, almost all of them can be analyzed mathematically as non-zero-sum problems.

Personal life

Until the end of the 50s, the future Nobel laureate John Nash climbed the scientific and career ladder, so to speak, jumping three steps. The main thing for him was ideas, not people. He treated his MIT colleague Eleanor Stier, who fell in love with him, coldly and cynically. He was not touched by the fact that the woman gave birth to his child. He simply did not acknowledge his paternity. By the way, Nash had no friends among his work colleagues. He was eccentric and strange, living in a world of formulas invented by himself. All his attention was devoted to one thing - developing ideal strategies.

Needless to say, the leading Cold War technologist, thirty-year-old John Nash, was thriving. His photo during these years is very similar to the photo of the actor who played him, Russell Crowe. A brunette with an intelligent face and a thoughtful look. Fortune magazine predicts fame and glory for him. In February 1957, he married Alicia Lard, and two years later they had a son, Martin. However, at this seemingly highest point career takeoff and personal well-being, John began to exhibit symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia.

Disease

In the 60s, he felt better, and Eleanor Stier gave the homeless scientist a roof over his head, and he spent time talking with his first son. Nash seemed to be improving and stopped taking his antipsychotic medications. The disease has returned.

Then, in the 70s, Alicia Lard gave him shelter. Colleagues gave him a job.

The road to recovery

At this point, he realized that he was living in an illusory world, deformed by schizophrenia and paranoia, and began to fight the disease. But he was not a doctor, but a scientist. Therefore, his weapon was not medical methods, but the game theory he himself developed. John Nash fought scientifically and consistently against paranoia. The film with Russell Crowe as a genius clearly showed this. He fought the disease around the clock, uncompromisingly, as with an opponent in the game, ahead of the initiative, minimizing his chances, limiting the choice of moves, depriving him of the initiative. As a result of this most important game in his life, the genius defeated madness: he achieved the constant absolute minimization of an incurable disease.

Finally, in 1990, doctors delivered the long-awaited verdict: John Nash recovered. We must pay tribute to the scientific world of the United States; they did not forget the genius, because all these more than fifty years they used the tools developed by Nash. In 1994, he won the Nobel Prize (for his student dissertation, written at the age of 21!). In 2001, Nash again tied the knot with Alicia Lard. Today, the famous scientist continues his scientific work in his Princeton office. He is interested in nonlinear strategies for using computers.

Conclusion

This American genius is an amazingly complete person, his whole life is proof of game theory. In his fate, triumph, love, madness, and the victory of intellect over paranoia came together. To analyze the surrounding reality, John Nash invariably uses scientific tools developed by himself.

The genius of a scientist can be very clearly characterized by Umberto Eco’s phrase (novel “Foucault’s Pendulum”) that a genius always plays on one component. However, his game is inimitable and unique. Because when he plays it, all the other components are involved.

A wonderful film, Beautiful Mind, is based on the life of John Nash. As with any work of fiction, the film contains discrepancies with the facts. At the end of the film, Nash receives the Nobel Prize and makes an unforgettable speech at the award ceremony in Stockholm. An elderly scientist who comprehended the secrets of mathematics and spent his entire life fighting a terrible disease - schizophrenia, says that he achieved everything in life because of love - his love for his wife Alicia and her love for him.

Nash never made this speech. The procedure for awarding the Nobel Prize in Economics does not involve speeches by the laureates, although the scientist then went to Sweden. In May 2015, Nash traveled to Scandinavia again. This time he was invited to Norway, where King Harald V on Tuesday presented him and his colleague Louis Nirenberg with the Abel Prize for their contributions to the study of differential equations. There, in Norway, the organizers helped the Nash spouses fulfill their dream of recent years - to meet and communicate with world chess champion Magnus Carlsen.

On Saturday, Nash and his wife returned to America and took a taxi home from the airport. The driver of the Ford they were traveling in tried to overtake the Chrysler, lost control and crashed into a road barrier. The Nash couple were not wearing seat belts and were thrown from the car and died on the spot. The driver was taken to the hospital, his life is not in danger.

John Nash was born on June 13, 1928 in a small town in West Virginia into an ordinary American family. My father is an electrical engineer, my mother is a teacher who quit her job after getting married and having children. Even as a child, Nash additionally studied mathematics and at the university, after a short-term passion for chemistry, he devoted himself entirely to this science. When he graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1948, his mentor gave him a recommendation to further his education and scientific research. The recommendation consisted of one sentence: “This man is a genius.” The talented young scientist was expected at Harvard, but he chose Princeton to be closer to his family.

It was at Princeton, as a 22-year-old boy (!), that Nash became interested in game theory and described the famous equilibrium, later called the “Nash equilibrium” in his honor. Nash proved that in any non-cooperative game (the so-called games where the exchange of information between participants is prohibited) there is a type of decision in which no participant can increase the payoff by changing his decision unilaterally, when other participants do not change their decisions. For a series of four papers on game theory, Nash received a PhD at the age of 22. History is silent about whether John's breakthrough in understanding game theory actually occurred when he was thinking about how he and his friends could better approach girls in a bar (so shown in the film), but most likely this is fiction. But it is definitely true that the basis of the GTO theory, which is now very fashionable in poker, is precisely the work of Nash, and pushbot situations are professionally analyzed only on the basis of the principles formulated by him.

He achieved great success in other areas of mathematics - his interests ranged from differential equations to singularity theory. In 2011, the NSA (National Security Agency) declassified letters Nash wrote in the 50s of the 20th century - even then he foresaw many of the concepts underlying modern cryptography.

However, Nash's brilliant career encountered an unexpected obstacle. His first signs of mental illness appeared in 1954, when in the city of Santa Monica (California) for some reason he went to a gathering place for local homosexuals and there, roughly speaking, took off his pants. No charges were brought, but Nash was deprived of highest degree access to state secrets. For many years he was haunted by accusations of homosexuality (not confirmed by anything other than this case), the attitude towards which was far from being so loyal in those years. A dark spot on the genius’s biography was his relationship with nurse Elinor Steer - he left her after learning about her pregnancy, and refused to take financial part in the life of their son John David (the film “A Beautiful Mind” was later condemned for not mentioning this fact ). However, Nash soon found his personal happiness - in the university music library, he met a student named Alicia who had moved to the United States from El Salvador and married her in 1957. “He was very smart and very handsome,” Alicia recalled.

Unfortunately, in 1959, while Alicia was pregnant, John Nash's health took a turn for the worse. He developed paranoid fears - for example, all people in red ties seemed to him to be participants in a communist conspiracy. He also had other hallucinations, mostly audio ones; Nash did not actually have the visual hallucinations so vividly shown in the film. At one of the lectures, he began to say something unimaginable, and his colleagues realized that something was wrong with him. Alicia had no choice but to put her husband in the hospital; he was given a terrible diagnosis - paranoid schizophrenia. Nash lost his job and spent much of his time in private and public psychiatric hospitals. Like almost any schizophrenic, he denied his illness; He had to be forcibly admitted to the clinic, which could not but affect the relationship with his wife. Despite Alicia's incredible devotion to her husband (their child was unnamed for a year as she waited for Nash to leave the hospital and say what name he liked), they divorced in 1962.

Nevertheless, Nash's loved ones continued to help, although he could, after being discharged from the clinic, suddenly leave for Europe, leaving them in complete ignorance and only occasionally sending illegible telegrams. The scientist himself tried to help himself - realizing that he was sick (in the film this happens in one of the most powerful scenes - Nash understands that the girl who constantly appears to him is not growing up, and therefore cannot be real), he set himself the goal of rationally analyzing his condition and try to learn to cope with it. Over time, he succeeded - despite completely refusing to take antipsychotics, in the 70s his condition began to improve, and since then he has not been admitted to the hospital. At that time, he played a big role in improving the professor’s condition ex-wife- she welcomed him back home and provided him with the opportunity to “live a quiet life,” which in her opinion was a key factor for recovery.

Nash himself criticized the film based on his life for the fact that it main character- for playing this role, Russell Crowe received BAFTA and Golden Globe awards, and was also nominated for an Oscar - still takes some experimental medications. He blamed this on the screenwriter, who, it seemed to him, was afraid that mentally ill people under the influence of the film would refuse to take their prescribed medications, trying to imitate the hero of A Beautiful Mind. John Nash, in his autobiography, described his way of dealing with mental illness: “Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the illusory lines of thinking that had previously characterized my condition. Most notably, this began with the rejection of politically oriented thinking, since such an approach was a pointless waste of intellectual effort. Nowadays, it seems to me that I think rationally, as scientists tend to do. “I wouldn’t say it gives me the joy that anyone recovering from a physical illness experiences,” Nash continues. “Sound thinking limits man’s ideas about his connection with the cosmos.”

In the late 70s, Nash began to gradually return to work, and in the late 80s, he began to use by email to communicate with working mathematicians. They say that many of them were shocked to receive a letter from “that same Nash.” However, it was young colleagues who confirmed to the Nobel Committee that John Nash’s mental state had returned to normal, and awarding him the prize would not harm its reputation.

The outstanding scientist became known to the general public at the beginning of the 21st century. In 1998, journalist Sylvia Nazar wrote a biography of the scientist, A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash; the book was highly praised by critics and nominated for the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. The book came across to producer Brian Grazer, and before he could finish reading it, he contacted the author and acquired the rights to the film adaptation. He involved screenwriter Akiva Goldsman in the creation of the film (it was he who came up with the idea of ​​not explaining to the audience for the time being that part of what the main character sees is just a hallucination) and director Ron Howard. The casting also turned out to be successful - the unexpected choice of Russell Crowe, who had just played in the film Gladiator, for the leading role, brought him a third Oscar nomination for Best Actor in a row; Jennifer Connelly performed brilliantly in the role of Nash's wife, Alicia. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote: “...Jennifer Conelly shines as Alicia. While Crowe has the larger role, it's Connelly's multifaceted performance as a woman torn between love and fear for the same man that elevates the film to new heights."

The film Beautiful Mind was liked not only by critics, but also by ordinary viewers - it grossed more than $300 million at the global box office - and received four Oscar awards, including in the main categories - Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay”, as well as “Best Supporting Actress” for Jennifer Connelly.

Despite the excitement, the Nash couple continued to live an ordinary “quiet” life. In 2001 they got married again. “We thought it was a good idea. After all, we’ve been together most of our lives,” said Alicia. They watched their favorite series “Doctor Who” together, John studied science to the best of his ability, continued to travel with lectures and receive awards around the world; Alicia provided for the life of her brilliant husband and their son, John Charles Martin Nash. Unfortunately, the family was not spared a repeated drama - the son turned out to have the same illness as his father - schizophrenia. Last years The Nashes were actively involved in social activities aimed at preserving and developing programs to support people with mental illnesses, which give such patients the opportunity to live outside of clinics. Alicia Nash explained her participation in this work simply: “When I’m gone, will Johnny have to live on the street?”

Alicia Nash was with her husband before last minute his life, confirming the validity of what Sylvia Nazari wrote in the book: “Nash’s genius is that he chose a woman thanks to whom he could survive.” Their son was less fortunate.

John and Alicia Nash are remembered around the world today. “We are shocked and saddened to hear of the untimely passing of John Nash and his wife and great champion, Alicia. "John's extraordinary achievements inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and scientists who were influenced by his brilliant work in game theory, and the story of his life with Alicia touched millions of readers and film fans who admired their courage in the face of great adversity," said Princeton's president. Christopher Eisgruber.

“Rest in peace to the wonderful Nobel laureate John Nash and his wonderful wife Alicia. It was an honor to tell part of their story."

John Nash died immediately after he and his colleague Louis Nirenberg received the Abel Prize, which in the world of mathematics is considered analogous to the Nobel Prize. Together with his wife, the 86-year-old mathematician returned to the United States from Norway, where this prestigious award is traditionally presented. Upon arrival home, John Nash and his 82-year-old wife took a taxi, the route of which ran through the New Jersey toll road. For example, it was along this road that the main character of the TV series “The Sopranos,” Tony, drove in the screensaver.

According to police officers who arrived at the scene of the tragedy, the driver of the taxi in which the Nash couple were traveling lost control while trying to overtake another car and, as a result, crashed into a fence. Neither Nash nor his wife were wearing seat belts and were ejected from the car.

Both died at the scene, and the taxi driver was taken to hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. No charges were brought against him.

Life of a genius

John Nash was born in West Virginia in 1928. At school, Nash did not show much interest in mathematics, but his teachers remembered him for his constant desire to read, his virtuoso game of chess, and his ability to whistle all of Bach’s works from memory. The future genius came to mathematics at the age of 13, when he was able to prove Fermat's little theorem.

After receiving his bachelor's and master's degrees from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, he abandoned his plans to follow in his father's footsteps and become an engineer. In 1947, John Nash entered the University, simultaneously rejecting the idea of ​​​​becoming a chemist. And less than two years later, at the age of 21, the mathematician wrote a dissertation on game theory, for which he later received the Nobel Prize.

When he entered the doctoral program at Princeton University, he had a rather short letter in his hands that read: “This man is a genius.”

In 1950, the scientist published a paper on the theory of non-cooperative games. The proposed Nash equilibrium turned out to be simple and effective means mathematical analysis of various situations, ranging from corporate competition to decision-making in the field of legislation.

According to his theory, there are games in which no player can increase the winnings unilaterally. All participants in the game either win or lose.

In some cases, they use strategies that create a stable balance, called the “Nash equilibrium.” A classic example explaining such a balance is negotiations between a union and an employer, which can lead to either a mutually beneficial agreement or a strike that is unprofitable for all parties.

In 1994, the scientist became a Nobel laureate in economics, sharing the prize with Reinhard Selten and John C. Harsanyi, who largely influenced the decision. It is known that not all of its members approved of the candidacy of Nash, who suffers from a serious mental disorder. Moreover, the mathematician was even denied the opportunity to give the traditional Nobel lecture for all Nobel laureates, believing that he would not be able to cope with the honorable task.

“I don’t dare say that mathematics and madness are directly related, but many great mathematicians suffered from schizophrenia, mental disorders and delirium,” the mathematician himself later recalled.

A few days before his death, John Nash received the Abel Prize for his contributions to the theory of nonlinear differential equations.

Illness and love

In 1957, John Nash married Alicia Lard, a physics student whom he met at MIT. Soon after his marriage, Nash began to show the first symptoms of schizophrenia. Thus, he considered people with red ties to be members of the Communist Party who organized a conspiracy against him. For some time, the scientist’s relatives managed to hide what was happening from others. However, in 1959, Nash still lost his job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

When asked to become dean of the Faculty of Mathematics, he stated that he was not going to waste time on nonsense and intended to become the emperor of Antarctica.

The prank was the last straw, after which the professor was placed in a psychiatric clinic at McLean Hospital. There he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After the mathematician underwent treatment and was discharged from the hospital, Nash and his family left for Europe. However, after some time he was deported back to the United States, and was denied political asylum.

Sometimes Nash wandered around Princeton and wrote strange formulas on the boards that made no sense.

Unable to bear this, Alicia divorced her husband in 1962, but did not leave him. In 2001, the couple got married again.

For many years, Nash's life consisted of a series of exacerbations between taking antipsychotic drugs and attempts to return to scientific activity. It was not until the mid-1980s that Nash recovered from his illness and was able to resume his studies in mathematics.

“I cured myself, without drugs. At some point, I just decided not to think about the disease,” John Nash himself recalled.

"Mind games"

In 1998, a biography of the scientist, “A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash,” written by American journalist Sylvia Nazar, appeared on bookstore shelves. Instantly becoming a bestseller, the book attracted the attention of the director. And in 2001, a film of the same name was made based on it, starring a brilliant mathematician suffering from schizophrenia, and as his wife.

The film received four Oscars, in particular in the categories “Best Picture” and “Best Director”. After news of Nash's death became known, Russell Crowe wrote in his

Mathematician and Nobel laureate John Forbes Nash Jr. was born on June 14, 1928. John Nash is a mathematician who has worked in the fields of game theory and differential geometry. He shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics with two other game theorists, Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi.

There are rumors in the scientific world that John was awarded the Nobel Prize for only one of his simplest works, and many of Nash's theories are simply incomprehensible. The most interesting thing is that John Nash did not use the works of his predecessors; he created most of his theories simply “from nowhere,” without using ready-made materials and theory. During his studies, John Nash even refused to attend lectures, citing the fact that he would not learn anything new there and would only lose valuable time.

After a promising start to his mathematical career, John Nash began to develop schizophrenia in his 30s, an illness that the mathematician learned about 25 years later.

John Forbes Nash Jr. was born in Bluefield, West Virginia to John Nash Sr. and Virginia Martin. His father was an electrical engineer, his mother an English teacher. As a teenager, John spent a lot of time reading books and conducting various experiments in his room, which soon became a laboratory. At the age of 14, John Nash proved Fermat's Little Theorem without any help.

From June 1945 to June 1948 John Nash attended Carnegie Polytechnic Institute in Pittsburgh, intending to become an engineer like his father. Instead, John fell deeply in love with mathematics and had a particular interest in topics such as number theory, Diophantine equations of quantum mechanics, and relativity. Nash especially loved problem solving.

At the Carnegie Institution, Nash became interested in the “bargaining problem” that John von Neumann had left unsolved in his book The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (1928).

After Pittsburgh, John Nash Jr. went to Princeton University, where he worked on the theory of equilibrium. He received his PhD in 1950 with a thesis on non-cooperative games. The dissertation contained the definition and properties of what would later be called “Nash Equilibrium,” and 44 years later it would earn him a Nobel Prize. His research on this subject led to three papers, the first entitled "Equilibrium Points in N-Numbered Games" published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA) (1950), and the rest in Econometrics on the Negotiation Problem (April 1950) and “Non-cooperative games with two participants” (January 1953).

In summer 1950 John Nash worked for the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California, where he returned for shorter periods in 1952 and 1954. In 1950-1951, Nash taught calculus courses at Princeton, studied and managed to avoid military service. During this time, he proved Nash's theorem on regular embeddings, which is one of the most important in differential geometry about manifolds. In 1951-1952, John became a research assistant at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

At MIT, John Nash met Alicia Lard, a student from El Salvador, whom he married in February 1957. Their son, John Charles Martin (born May 20, 1959), remained nameless for a year because Alicia, due to the fact that John Nash was in a psychiatric clinic, did not want to name the child herself. Following in his parents' footsteps, John became a mathematician, but like his father, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. John Nash had another son, John David (born 19 June 1953), with Eleanor Steer, but he wanted nothing to do with them. Admittedly bisexual, Nash had relationships with men during this period.

Although Alicia and John divorced in 1963, they remarried in 1970. But according to Sylvia Nazar's biography of Nash, they lived "like two distant relatives under the same roof" until John Nash received the Nobel Prize in 1994 , then they resumed their relationship and got married on June 1, 2001.

IN In 1958, John Nash began to show the first signs of his mental illness. He became paranoid and was admitted to McLean Hospital in April-May 1959, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. After problematic stays in Paris and Geneva, Nash returned to Princeton in 1960. He bounced around mental hospitals until 1970 and conducted research at Brandeis University from 1965 to 1967. Between 1966 and 1996, John Nash did not publish a single scientific paper. In 1978 he was awarded the John von Neumann Prize for “Equilibrium Analysis in the Theory of Non-Cooperative Games.”

John Nash's psychological condition slowly but gradually improved. His interest in mathematical problems gradually returns, and with it his ability to think logically. In addition, he became interested in programming. 1990s his genius returned. In 1994, John Nash received the Nobel Prize in Economics as a result of his work on game theory at Princeton.

Since 1945 to 1996 Nash published 23 scientific papers, plus an autobiography, Les Prix Nobel (1994).

A film called A Beautiful Mind starring Russell Crowe, released in December 2001 and directed by Ron Howard, showed some of the events from the biography of John Nash. It, (loosely) based on a biography of the same title written by Sylvia Nasar in 1999, won 4 Oscars in 2002. However, in this film, many events from John's life are embellished or even untrue, as happens in many film adaptations to create a greater effect on the public. Unlike the film, Nash's manifestations of schizophrenia did not involve deciphering newspapers for spies. In fact, it seemed to John that encrypted messages from aliens periodically appeared in newspapers, which only he could decipher. But all this is nonsense. In the film, John Nash was not cured of schizophrenia, which in turn is incurable. In real life everything is much more interesting. For thirty years, Nash was in various psychological clinics, from which he periodically escaped, but at one point John was mysteriously cured. How this happened still remains a mystery...

Mathematician and Nobel laureate John Nash died in a car accident in the US state of New Jersey at the age of 86. As a local police spokesman said on Sunday, May 24, Nash was traveling in a taxi with his 82-year-old wife Alicia, who also died. As the police clarified, the driver lost control and crashed into a bump stop. According to preliminary data, both passengers were not wearing seat belts and died on the spot, dpa reports. The taxi driver was injured and was hospitalized.