At a press conference earlier this year, illustrious mathematician and Nobel laureate John Forbes Nash, Jr. joked that he must be an “honorary Scandinavian”. It had just been announced that he was one of the two winners of the Abel prize—awarded by Norway for achievements in mathematics, a field the Nobel prize, awarded by Sweden, doesn’t cover. Nash, whose pioneering work on equilibrium in non-cooperative games is a pillar of game theory and won him the 1994 economics Nobel, passed away on Saturday in a tragic car crash that also killed his wife, Alicia.
While Nash’s Equilibrium in game theory—theorised in his 28-page doctoral dissertation at Princeton University in 1950—continues to influence decision-making across corporates and governments, the Abel came to him for his work in geometry and partial differential equations, which he undertook at MIT from the early 1950s to the turn of the next decade, before he was lost to schizophrenia. At MIT, the legendary mathematician derived two embedding theorems—the Nash-Moser theorem and the Nash-Di Giorgi theorem—that are considered the mathematical equivalent of the classics. In fact, as per a column in The Guardian, the later of the two theorems—concerning elliptic partial differential equations—would have won Nash the Fields Medal, the highest honour in mathematics, had it not been for that fact that it was simultaneously arrived at by Ennio Di Giorgi (the two weren’t aware of each other’s work). Nash would succumb to mental illness soon after—for the next 40 or so years, he could only do research in brief bursts of lucidity—but he had started showing marked improvement over the last couple of decades. That is what makes the passing away of this beautiful mind all the more tragic.
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