John Nash died in a car accident

The Princeton University scholar and Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash, who was 86, and his wife Alicia died in a car accident on Saturday. According to the New Jersey State Police, they were travelling in a taxi on the New Jersey Turnpike and were spewed out from the vehicle.

The film ‘ A Beautiful Mind’, in which Nash was the subject, had narrated his pioneering work in game theory. It was for this theory that he won the Nobel Prize in Economic sciences in 1994. Abel Prize, one of mathematics’ most prestigious honors which is considered to be Nobel in maths, also reached out to him in March this year.

The film also told Nash’s struggles with psychological problems. He had suffered from schizophrenia and later in life became a champion for ameliorating mental health care.

Nash’s Game theory had led to fundamental changes in economics and political science. Another field where Nash’s theory  applied was population genetics and evolutionary biology, where it has been used to explain competition between different species.

Nash showed early interest in mathematics when he was about 14 years old after reading ET Bell’s Men of Mathematics. Given the fact that his father was an electrical engineer and he decided to follow his father’s footsteps, he did not foresee a career in mathematics at the time. It was in Princeton that his geniuses in mathematics unravelled. In order to be an independent mathematician, he kept distance from books and regular classes; instead he worked things out from first principles. For his thesis titled ” Non-cooperative Games”, he received his doctorate from Princeton .However, it was a brilliant work titled ” Real Algebraic Manifolds” that had established him as one of the world’s leading mathematicians.

interactive editor