John Forbes Nash

John Forbes Nash (Bluefield, West Virginia, June 13, 1928-Monroe, New Jersey, May 23, 2015) was an American mathematician, specialist in game theory, geometry differential equations and partial differential equations, was laureate of the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel (Nobel Prize in Economics) in 1994 for his contributions to game theory and negotiation processes, along with to Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi, and with the Abel Prize in 2015 for their contributions to the theory of partial differential equations.

The film A Beautiful Mind (2001), winner of four Oscars, including Best Picture, is based on her life based on the novel by Sylvia Nasar

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Biography

Childhood

Father's name was also John Forbes Nash was born in Texas in 1892 and studied electrical engineering. After fighting in France in World War I, he spent a year as a professor of World War I at the University of Texas, after which he joined the Appalachian Power Company in Bluefield, West Virginia.^{[citation required]}

Nash Jr.'s mother, Margaret Virginia Martin (5-1-1897/11-16-1969), was a teacher for ten years before marrying his father on September 6, 1924.^{[ citation required]}

John Forbes Nash Jr., was born at Bluefield Sanatorium on June 13, 1928, and was baptized into the Episcopalian Church. His biographers say that he was a lonely and introverted child, although he was surrounded by a loving and attentive family. It seems that he liked reading a lot and very little playing with other children. His mother encouraged him in his studies by teaching him directly and taking him to good schools; She, who had studied several languages at West Virginia Universities and Martha Washington College, encouraged him to study. At the age of fourteen he began to show an interest in mathematics and chemistry, perhaps influenced by the book published by Eric Temple Bell in 1937: Men of Mathematics . He entered Bluefield College in 1941. ^{[citation needed]}

Study period

Won a scholarship in the George Westinghouse competition. In June 1945 he enrolled at what is now Carnegie Mellon University to study chemical engineering, unlike his father. However, he began to excel in mathematics, whose department was then headed by John Synge, who recognized Nash's special talent and convinced him to specialize in mathematics.^{[citation needed]}

He graduated with a degree in mathematics in 1948. He was accepted for graduate study at Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, and Michigan universities. Nash considered that the best was Harvard, but Princeton offered him a better scholarship so he decided to study there, where he entered in September 1948. ^{[citation needed ]}

In 1949, while preparing for his doctorate, he wrote the paper for which he would be awarded the Nobel Prize five decades later. In 1950 he obtained his doctorate with a thesis entitled Non-cooperative Games & # 34;. Note that the initial book on game theory, Theory of Games and Economic Behavior", by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, was published shortly before that, in 1944.^{[citation required]}

In 1950 he began working for the RAND Corporation, an institution that channeled funds from the United States government for scientific studies related to the cold war and in which he was trying to apply recent advances in game theory for analysis of diplomatic and military strategies. He simultaneously continued to work at Princeton. In 1952 he entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a professor. It seems that his classes were very unorthodox and he was not a popular teacher among the students, who also complained about his examination methods. Three years later he accepted a scholarship from Princeton University for a Ph.D. in mathematics. The letter of recommendation contained a single sentence: "This man is a genius".

University term

Princeton University was taught by Albert Einstein and John von Neumann, which fueled his desire to stand out and gain some recognition. He invented a “mathematically perfect” game (on which Hex was later based) and in 1949 wrote an article entitled Equilibrium Points in n-Person Games, in the which defines the Nash equilibrium. At the age of 21, he received his doctorate with a thesis of less than thirty pages on non-cooperative games, under the direction of Albert W. Tucker. He immediately achieved recognition among the rest of the specialists and shortly after began working for RAND, a research institution. the United States Air Force dedicated to strategic research.

In 1952 he met Eleanor Stier, the first nurse who treated him with greater intensity; He had a son with her, John David Stier (6-19-1953), whom he ignored. Despite the fact that she tried to convince him, Nash did not want to marry her. His parents found out about this affair in 1956. His father died shortly after learning of the scandal and it appears that John Nash, Jr. felt guilty about it.^{[citation needed ]}

In the summer of 1954, he was arrested during a police raid against homosexuals. In 1957 he married a former student of his from MIT, Alicia Lardé López-Harrison, Salvadoran, with whom he had his second son, John Charles Martin Nash (5-20-1959), who also suffered from schizophrenia. After a year of marriage, he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and everything changed. After spending fifty days in McLean Hospital, he traveled to Europe, where he attempted to obtain political refugee status. He believed that he was persecuted by "crypto-communists" (infiltrated communist agents). He was hospitalized on several occasions for periods of five to eight months in various psychiatric centers in New Jersey and came out believing that he had been cured, until he decided to stop his drug treatment, which caused the hallucinations to reappear. About to be hospitalized again, he realized his hallucinations, so, using the theory that every problem has a solution, he decided to solve his psychiatric problem on his own and thus, over time Over time, he learned to live with his hallucinations by ignoring them completely.

His theories have influenced global trade negotiations, advances in evolutionary biology, and national labor relations. Several years later, Nash managed to return to the university, where he taught mathematics classes.

Mental Illness

Nash at a conference on game theory in 2006 (Colony)

Initially Nash's mental illness manifested as paranoia; his wife would later describe his behavior as erratic. Nash seemed to believe that all the men wearing red ties were part of a group of communists conspiring against him; Nash would send letters to the embassies in Washington, D.C., stating that they were establishing a kind of government in the country. His psychic problems would manifest themselves within his professional life when in one of his speeches on the Riemann hypothesis, read in the American Mathematical Society at Columbia University in 1959, Nash spoke in words that were incomprehensible, so his colleagues in the audience immediately realized something was wrong.

Between April and May 1959, he was admitted to McLean Hospital, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders version IV-TR (known as DSM IV-TR), the person who suffers from this disorder presents a chronic psychotic state (greater than six months), characterized due to alterations and disorganization in cognition, in the expression of affection, in behavior and in thought, with paranoid delusions and alterations in sensory perception (hallucinations). The person has ideas outside of reality and irreducible to logic (delusional ideas), that is, they perceive things that are not real as real, coupled with auditory and visual hallucinations. Lack of will and motivation (avolition), persistent, are frequently associated with depression.

In 1961 he was admitted to the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital in New Jersey. For the next nine months he spent periods in psychiatric hospitals, where he received antipsychotic drug treatments and insulin shock therapy.

Although the drugs he was taking were prescribed, Nash would later claim that he was only taking them against his will. Since 1970, he no longer accepted being admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and refused to continue consuming medication. According to Nash, the claim in the film described below that, even after that date, he was also using atypical antipsychotics that were not prescribed at the time, was inaccurate. He attributed this claim to the screenwriter, in order to prevent people with similar disorders, who saw the film, from stopping their medication. Journalist Robert Whitaker wrote an article suggesting that Nash's speedy recovery may have been affected by the consumption of said medications.

Nash believed that psychiatric drugs were not very effective and that the adverse effects were not serious after someone was diagnosed with a mental illness. According to Sylvia Nasar, Nash gradually recovered from his illness over the years. time and thanks to the support of his wife, Alicia Lardé. Nash managed to continue working thanks to his community environment, where his eccentricities were accepted. Alicia Lardé said of her husband: "It's just a matter of living a quiet life."

According to Nash, the beginning of his mental disorders could be placed during the first months of 1959, when his wife was pregnant. Describing the process as a shift "from rational scientific thinking to the delusional thinking typical of people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia or paranoid schizophrenia". For Nash, this included seeing himself as a messenger or someone that it has a certain mission; surrounded by both supporters and opponents and secret agents, among whom he felt he was persecuted and wanted to solve puzzles of divine revelation. Nash suggested that his delusions were related to his feeling of unhappiness, his desires to feel important and recognized, and to his characteristic way of thinking, saying: "I would not have had such good ideas scientifically, if I had had a more normal way of thinking." He also expressed, "If I hadn't felt so pressured, I doubt I would have suffered from this disorder." He did not categorically draw a distinction between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Nash also mentioned that he did not hear voices in his head until before. of 1964, and that later he, of his own free will, rejected those voices. He also declared that they always forced him to go to psychiatric hospitals against his will; that he was temporarily giving up his "delusional dream hypotheses"; after being in a hospital long enough to say that he had recovered or that he already had normal "rationally forced" behavior. That he alone on his own he managed to "intelligently reject" some of his "delusional influences" and his "politically oriented" beliefs; as soon as he felt comfortable. By 1995, he said that, however, even though he "had returned to thinking rationally as a scientist," he still felt more limited than he had thought before.

In 1994 he wrote:

I have been around five to eight months in New Jersey hospitals, always against my will and always trying to give some legal argument to get out of them. And it happened that after having been hospitalized for a fairly long time, I finally managed to give up my delusional hypothesis and re-conceive myself as a human being of more conventional circumstances; I could thus return to my mathematical research; in these periods, so to speak, of forced rationality, I was successful in doing some respectable mathematical research. In this way research was possible Le problème de Cauchy pour les équations différentielles d'un fluide général; or work on the idea to which Professor Hironaka called "the brilliant transformation of Nash"; and research for The arch structure of the singularities and Analyticity of solutions of implicit function problems with analytical data.

But after my return to the delusional hypothesis, which seemed to be dreams at the end of the 1960s, I became a person of delusional thought, though of relatively moderate behavior; and that helped me avoid hospitalizations and the direct treatment of psychiatrists.

And so it took a little longer. Gradually I began to intelligently reject some lines of thought that were influenced in a delusional way and which had been characteristics of my orientation. This began to be seen more clearly with the rejection of politically oriented thinking as something that is essentially a useless waste of intellectual effort. So, today, I have rethinked rationally, in the style that is characteristic of scientists.

A Beautiful Mind

In 1998, Sylvia Nasar published the novel A Beautiful Mind (published in Spanish in 2012 under the title A prodigious mind). In 2001 the homonymous film was released, directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe (the film circulated under the titles A wonderful mind in Spain and A brilliant mind in Latin America). Based on the life of John Nash, the film won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. This is not an exact biography, since there are certain differences between reality and fiction. In this regard, Nash himself stated: «It has errors and licenses, even on filming locations. For example, it was not filmed at Princeton University, which is where I studied, although there is a building that makes you think of Princeton. However, he acknowledges that "the positive thing was that he was able to draw worldwide attention to schizophrenia."

Death

On May 23, 2015, Nash died at age 86 along with his wife Alicia Lardé López-Harrison, 82, in a car accident on the Turnpike at the New Jersey Turnpike near Monroe Township, New Sweater. The driver of the taxi in which they were coming from Newark Airport lost control and hit a railing, just on the return trip after Nash received the 2015 Abel Prize from King Harald V, in Oslo, Norway. collision occurred when the taxi tried to overtake another vehicle. According to a version of a local police sergeant, named Gregory Williams, neither was wearing seatbelts, so the couple were thrown from the vehicle after the impact. The taxi driver was rescued from the vehicle and taken with non-life-threatening injuries to Robert Wood Teaching Hospital. The incident occurred on a Saturday around 4:30 p.m. m. Louis Nirenberg said he spoke to the couple for an hour at the Newark airport before they both got into a taxi. Nirenberg said that Nash was truly a great mathematician and "sort of a genius."

Acknowledgments

John Nash's contributions to mathematics and economics earned him numerous awards throughout his life. Among them, the following should be highlighted:

• 1978 – John von Neumann Theory Award for his fundamental theoretical contributions to operational research.
• 1994 – Award of the Bank of Sweden in Economics in memory of Alfred Nobel (Premio Nobel de Economía) for his analysis of balance in the theory of non-cooperative Games.
• 1999 – Leroy P. Steele Award from the American Mathematical Society, for its fundamental contribution to mathematical research.
• 2010 – Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Double Helice Medal for its work in defense of mental illness rights.
• 2015 – Abel Prize, for its work in partial differential equations.