John Nash, the famous Princeton University Mathematician, was killed in a car accident along with his wife on May 23 in New Jersey. He was on his way home after receiving a prize for mathematics from King Harald V of Norway when their taxi driver lost control of the car. He was 86. His wife Alicia de Lardé was 82.
His most famous contributions consisted of non-zero sum game theory, the study of choosing optimal strategies against a perfectly rational opponent. The concept of Nash equilibrium is an important consequence of this theory, and is a situation in which each player is assumed to know the best strategy of each other, and cannot get a better outcome by changing his choice. His contributions also involved formalizing the minimax algorithm in order to optimize the outcome of zero-sum games. Today, this work finds applications in sciences ranging from evolutionary biology to economics to political science. For this, he was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics.
Outside of game theory, Nash also made great contributions to algebraic topology and differential geometry with the Nash embedding theorem, and contributed to the study of nonlinear partial differential equations. In particular, his contributions in connecting nonlinear PDEs to geometric analysis are especially important. For these contributions, he received the 2015 Abel Prize, offered by the Government of Norway to outstanding mathematicians. It is upon returning from accepting this prize that John and Alicia Nash were killed in the accident.
Nash accomplished this despite a long history of battling mental illness, including paranoid schizophrenia. His mental problems crossed into his professional life in 1959, and John spent much of the sixties in the New Jersey State Hospital at Trenton. Treatment was proving to be effective, as he was never committed to an institution after 1970. His struggle proved particularly difficult on his wife Alicia, with the marriage falling apart in 1963. The couple remarried in 2001.
Our condolences are sent out to the Nash family, and to John Nash’s close friends and colleagues, while we mourn the loss of this great mathematician.
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