Winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics, John Forbes Nash Jr. was an extremely talented and gifted mathematician who was often referred to as eccentric, a nonconformist, and a genius. He was envied by many of his colleagues who disliked his egocentric attitude. For three decades of his life, he suffered from a mental disease known as schizophrenia that derailed his career as a mathematician. In 2015, he was awarded the Abel Prize for his contributions to the topic of partial differential equations. A movie titled “A Beautiful Mind” was released in 2001 based on his struggle with schizophrenia. Nash was born on June 13, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia. Many described him as introverted, yet incredibly smart. Like most geniuses, Nash’s smarts were mistaken as an inability to do the work in the fourth grade. However, in high school, he won the George Westinghouse Award, an award that was only given to ten students nationwide. This award provided him with a scholarship to the Carnegie Institute of …show more content…
Additionally, he immersed himself in game theory, a growing field in mathematics. At twenty-one years old, he wrote his doctoral thesis that surrounded the idea of the “Nash equilibrium,” a method of calculating the result of a strategic interaction, which would later reconstruct the domain of economics. In 1951, Nash joined the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here, his colleagues tolerated his mathematical genius although they disliked his boastful manner. In addition, Nash met his wife-to-be, Alicia Larde Nash, who was a physics major at the time. During his time at MIT, Nash solved many daunting math problems with topics ranging from partial differential equations to algebraic geometry. In 1958, at the age of thirty, Fortune magazine dubbed him as one of the brightest mathematicians in the