John F. Nash Jr.
Facts
Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.
John F. Nash Jr.
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 1994
Born: 13 June 1928, Bluefield, WV, USA
Died: 23 May 2015, New Jersey, NJ, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA
Prize motivation: “for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games”
Prize share: 1/3
Life
John F Nash was an American mathematician born in Bluefield, West Virginia. He attended Carnegie Institute of technology and later Princeton University where he begun working on his equilibrium theory. He later worked at MIT in the mathematics faculty. John F Nash was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1959 and has spoken openly about mental illness. Nash and his wife tragically passed away in a car accident in 2015. He had two children.
Work
John F. Nash is the only person who has been awarded both the Economic Sciences Prize and the Abel Prize. He received the Economic Sciences Prize for his work in game theory, more specifically the Nash equilibrium theory. He introduced the distinction between cooperative games and non-cooperative games. He also did ground breaking work in other mathematics and developed the Nash embedding theorem.
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