Joh Nash

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Introduction:

John Forbes Nash Jr. was born June 13, 1928 he is an American mathematician who works in game theory and differential geometry. He shared the 1994 Nobel prize in Economics with two other game theorists, Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi. He is best known in popular culture as the subject of the Hollywood movie, A Beautiful Mind, about his mathematical genius and his struggles with mental illness.

Childhood/Adolence:

On June 13, 1928, John Forbes Nash was born in the small Appalachian town of Bluefield, West Virginia, the son of John Nash Sr., an electrical engineer, and Virginia Martin, a teacher. At 12, he was carrying out scientific experiments in his room at home. John at a young age didn't like working with other people, preferring to do things alone. Instead of being social with his classmates he instead exhanged it for intellectual superiority, and he believed that dances and sports to be a distraction from experiments and studies. Martha, his sister, seems to have been a remarkably normal child while John seemed different from other children.By the time he was in highdchool he was reading the classic " Men Of Mathematics" by E.T. He also did electrical and chemistry experiments at the time. In his senior year of high school, John won a coveted Westinghouse scholarship, one of only ten awarded in the nation. He went to the Carnegie Institute of Technology and, in 1948, graduated with a Master's degree after only three years. Although he had originally planned to study chemical engineering, he quickly discovered a love for mathematics and changed his major. His advisor wrote a recommendation for him saying "This man is a genius".

He took the William Lowell Putnam Mathematics Competition twice but, al...

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...is own path and problems though he continues to work in a public setting to assist in managing his illness.Nash is still at Princeton, where he holds an appointment in mathematics. While cautious with people he does not know, he is said to have a dry sense of humor.

In 1978 John was awarded the John Von Neumann Theory Prize for his invention of non-cooperative equilibria, now called Nash equilibria.In 1994 he received the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel as a result of his game theory work as a Princeton graduate student.Between 1945 and 1996, Nash published 23 scientific studies. Nash also created two popular games: Hex, in 1942 with Piet Hein; and So Long Sucker, in 1964 with M. Hausner and Lloyd S. Shapley. Both games demonstrate what Nash worked on for years: the concept that in a game, one must win and everyone else must lose.

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