John Nash, the mathematician credited with foundational work in the field of game theory, has died. The 86-year old and his wife Alicia were passengers in a taxi when the driver lost control of the vehicle on the New Jersey Turnpike, killing both. Apparently neither Nash nor his wife were wearing seat belts, since both were ejected from the car after it slammed into a guard rail, according to NJ state police.
Nash struggled with paranoid schizophrenia throughout his adult life, and was admitted to psychiatric hospitals multiple times. The tragedy of a great mathematician battling such an unpredictable ailment was profiled in Sylvia Nasar's book "A Beautiful Mind", which was made into a rather fanciful Hollywood movie by Ron Howard, starring Russell Crowe as Nash. Nash was amused by the film.
As depicted in the film, Alicia Nash met her husband when she was a student at MIT enrolled in Nash's advanced calculus class (in the film, Prof. Nash is given the assignment to teach the class as he enters the classroom building; Nash's first move was to dump the 'Calculus of Several Variables' textbook he has been handed into the waste basket). They married in 1957. Alicia Nash filed for divorce a few years later, but continued to care for Prof. Nash for decades; they remarried in 2001.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @02:38AM
Or only some of them? Which one was John Nash, a leaf node or the root node? Anybody have a graph?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday May 25 2015, @03:34AM
I started writing Living with Schizoaffective Disorder [warplife.com] the day after I saw the movie.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @03:43AM
If seeing the movie had such an impact on you, wait 'til you hear the voices. Oh... wait
(my respects go here, the above is just kidding)
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday May 25 2015, @03:50AM
my hallucinations are mostly visual.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 25 2015, @05:47AM
The comment you are reading right now is real. Or is it?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday May 25 2015, @03:18PM
How do I know that soylent news even exists?
I do not because I cannot.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Monday May 25 2015, @02:56PM
"Somebody of relative note and importance just died. Let me point out there's an opportunity here TO TALK ABOUT ME."
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by captain normal on Monday May 25 2015, @05:07AM
Keep on writing Michael.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by chrysosphinx on Monday May 25 2015, @06:31AM
please, consider your ability to be a perk, not illness
(Score: 2, Funny) by Empyrean on Monday May 25 2015, @02:41PM
I have schizo-affective disorder as well, and trust me when I say that the ability to have mania/depression is a lousy superpower.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Monday May 25 2015, @12:29PM
His autobiography is here, and pretty good:
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/laureates/1994/nash-bio.html [nobelprize.org]
Until I read it I didn't know he was a fellow chemEng refugee like myself. That major has got to be the ultimate "moth to the flame" for STEM people, freshman walk in "oh how cool" and by sophomore year its all "F this shit, hello EE/CS" or whatever. The interest level is high so recruitment rates are fine, its just the attrition rate is incredible. I guess the best way of putting it is the best jobs in the field are really cool and even the boring jobs as described by actual ChemEng sound at least somewhat interesting but as the schools teach it, the specific job has all the joy and curiosity of filling out calculus based tax returns, kind of.
I suppose I knew how to program before I went to school, and if I had to learn programming from school, maybe I'd hate it. However its hard to do theoretical and experimental work with fluidized bed reactor catalysts as a high school kid, at least compared to booting up a computer and installing a dev environment on it. So that might be a factor in survival of various majors.
The autobiography is also one of those "stories about old people not fitting into modern culture" where under modern publish or perish rules he would have perished. Makes you wonder how many possible future Fields or Nobel winners in 2040 will never be heard of because they got kicked out of academia in 2015 for not publishing enough.
(Score: 2) by fliptop on Monday May 25 2015, @03:40PM
Personally, I think it's organic chemistry that really weeds out the weaklings.
Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by FatPhil on Monday May 25 2015, @02:37PM
Such a shame, but I'm a believer that the more significant death is that when your name last gets mentioned, rather than just the mere mechanical one he's just suffered, and by that measure, John Nash will be effectively immortal.
Well, there are no more moves to be played, and finally Nash has reached his equilibrium.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2, Informative) by siwelwerd on Tuesday May 26 2015, @02:42AM
A glaring omission from the summary is that he was on his way home from the airport, returning from Oslo where he received the Abel prize (arguably the most prestigious prize in mathematics). And while his game theory work gets all the headlines, most mathematicians would argue his most impressive work was in differential geometry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_embedding_theorem) or nonlinear PDEs.