1928-

American Mathematician

Mathematician John Forbes Nash was born in Bluefield, West Virginia. He undertook his undergraduate work at Carnegie Mellon University, and his graduate work at Princeton. At age 22 Nash earned his doctorate with papers and a thesis on non-cooperative games.

John Milnor (left) receiving the Medal of Science from President Lyndon Johnson in 1966. (The Library of Congress. Reproduced by permission.)

Nash's thesis work established the theory of equilibria in non-cooperative games, earning him a share of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics nearly half a century later. Nash received the Nobel Prize with Hungarian-American economist John C. Harsanyi and German mathematician Reinhard Selten. The Nobel Prize for Economics is designated to recognize substantial and important contributions to political science, psychology, and sociology.

The brilliance of Nash's work was obscured by a three-decade-long battle with paranoid schizophrenia. Despite frequent hospitalizations and the sometimes debilitating...