John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician whose life was depicted in the Oscar-winning film, A Beautiful Mind, was killed, along with his wife Alicia, in a car accident on the NJ Turnpike yesterday afternoon. They had been returning from Newark Airport, after a trip to Norway where Nash had received a prestigious math prize.
According to NJ.com, "The Nashes were in a taxi traveling southbound in the left lane of the New Jersey Turnpike, State Police Sgt. Gregory Williams said. The driver of the Ford Crown Victoria lost control as he tried to pass a Chrysler in the center lane, crashing into a guard rail. The Nashes were ejected from the car, Williams said."
Williams added, 'It doesn't appear that they were wearing seatbelts."
John Nash was 86 and Alicia Nash was 82; the couple lived in Princeton. The taxi driver was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries.
Last week, Nash, a senior research mathematician at Princeton, was in Norway to receive the top mathematics award, The Abel Prize, shared with NYU's Louis Nirenberg, for their work in geometric analysis. NJ.com spoke to Nirenberg, who "said Nash was a 'wonderful mathematician' and person. Nirenberg had just flown back from Norway with the couple. The Nashes were taking a taxi back from the airport, he said. Nirenberg had known the couple since the 1950s."
Nash’s contributions to this field are widely considered more profound than the research in game theory that earned him a Nobel.
Partial differential equations (those that involve multiple, independent derivatives) are fundamental to pure maths and crop up throughout science, describing phenomena from the diffusion of heat to the motion of quantum particles. “Partial differential equations lie at the foundation of many areas, both within and beyond mathematics, ranging from geometry to physics,” says mathematician Robert Kohn of the Courant Institute. “Louis Nirenberg and John Nash have had huge influence on this field, not only by solving important problems, but more importantly by introducing fundamentally new methods and ideas.”
Here's another explanation of their work (PDF).
A Princeton website gives this background about Nash, "Noted mathematician John Nash, Jr. (1928- ) received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1950. The impact of his 27 page dissertation on the fields of mathematics and economics was tremendous. In 1951 he joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. His battle with schizophrenia began around 1958, and the struggle with this illness would continue for much of his life. Nash eventually returned to the community of Princeton. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994."
You can read his dissertation here (PDF); as many college economics students know, the "Nash equilibrium" "is a solution concept of a non-cooperative game involving two or more players, in which each player is assumed to know the equilibrium strategies of the other players, and no player has anything to gain by changing only their own strategy." (Another explanation here.)
The film, A Beautiful Mind, focused on Nash's struggle with paranoid schizophrenia and how his wife Alicia aided him; Russell Crowe portrayed Nash and Jennifer Connelly played Alicia, and won an Oscar for her work.
Stunned...my heart goes out to John & Alicia & family.
An amazing partnership. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts. https://t.co/XF4V9MBwU4
— Russell Crowe (@russellcrowe) May 24, 2015
Princeton says the film is "loosely" based on Nash's life. Still, here's how the film moviesplained the Nash equilibrium:
And here's Nash speaking to the Oxford Union about game theory:
Ahead of receiving the Abel Prize, Nash told Norwegian mathematician Jo Røislien, "You can learn more. You have more time.”
Source : gothamist
And here's Nash speaking to the Oxford Union about game theory:
Ahead of receiving the Abel Prize, Nash told Norwegian mathematician Jo Røislien, "You can learn more. You have more time.”
Source : gothamist
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