NEW YORK The mathematician and Nobel laureate John F. Nash died yesterday with his wife in a car accident in New Jersey. He was 86.
Nash was not only known for his contribution to expanding the scope and power of modern economic theory but a life that had to live with mental illness and He was portrayed in the film A Beautiful Mind .
The day before yesterday, the taxi driver they were traveling Nash and his wife, Alicia, 82, lost control while trying to pass another car and he crashed into the guardrail and another vehicle. The couple left ejected from the car and died instantly.
The Nash returned from Norway where John had been with Louis Nirenberg, a mathematician at the University of New York, the Abel Prize of the Academy of Sciences and Letters of Norway.
Nash was recognized as one of the great mathematicians of the twentieth century, especially for the originality of his thought and his audacity in attacking complex problems. “The outstanding achievements of John inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and scientists,” said the president of Princeton University, Christopher L. Eisgruber.
In his Twitter account, Russell Crowe, who played Nash in A Beautiful Mind , said he was “dismayed” by the death of the scientist. “A perfect partnership: minds and shiny hearts,” he wrote on the couple
His great contribution was the publication in 1950 of the theory of noncooperative games, which became a powerful mathematical tool. to analyze from a wide range of competitive situations to the legislative decision-making. At present, the focus
is used not only in economics but also in the social sciences, and even evolutionary biology. Harold W. Kuhn, professor emeritus of mathematics at Princeton and friend and colleague many years Nash until his death in 2014, once said: “I think that in the twentieth century have not been many major economic ideas, and maybe your idea of balance [the theory that thought] is among the ten most important “.
” Jane Austen wrote six novels. Bach wrote six partitas, “said Barry Mazur, a professor of mathematics at Harvard he was a newcomer to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when Nash was teaching there. “His purely mathematical contributions are located on this level. Wrote very little, but what he wrote had an incredible impact,” he added.
A brilliant work
The mathematician became a symbol of the struggle against the destructive force of mental illness -padecía of schizophrenia and the stigma that sufferers often load, thanks to the publication of his biography written by Sylvia Nasar and the success of Oscar winning film. In both works his brilliant ascent in the middle of schizophrenia, recovering his rationality and obtaining Nobel in 1994 is recounted.
Following the receipt as a mathematician at Carnegie Mellon, Nash landed in Princeton in 1948. Alto and attractive, quickly became famous for his intellectual arrogance, his strange habits -abandonaba conversations and whistled half without stopping and fierce ambition.
There, he focused on solving a problem mathematician John von Neumann and economist Oskar Morgenstern, pioneers of game theory had left unresolved. They had only addressed what they called zero-sum games. That is, those in which the gain of a player is the loss of another. But in practice the interests of the players are not opposed completely, and there are opportunities in which the gain is mutual. Nash solution, written when he was 21, offered to analyze how the way in which each player could maximize his profit by assuming that your opponent also act to maximize their own. Your contribution paved the way for economic theory could be applied to a wide variety of other situations that exceed market movements.
Fighting madness
In 1957 married, remarried, with Alicia Larde, who had graduated in physics at MIT. In early 1959, when his wife was pregnant with their son John, Nash began to crumble. He began to suffer from paranoia and hallucinations that led him to be hospitalized. It was the beginning of a sharp deterioration. He received electroshock therapy. Finally, he fled to Europe for a while.
Back in the United States, he wandered for years by the Princeton campus, become a solitary figure unintelligible scribbling formulas on blackboards. Although game theory gained relevance and their work was increasingly mentioned and taught, Nash had disappeared from the professional world. Until 1994, when he won the Nobel, the mathematical resumed his career.
Alicia divorced him in 1963, but in 1970 took him to live with her. The couple remarried in 2001. Nash had two sons, John David Stier-from a first marriage with Eleanor and John Charles Martin Stier-.
Translation Jaime Arrambide .
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