John Nash Biography

John Nash was the Princeton mathematician whose work on game theory won him the Nobel Prize, and whose life experience with schizophrenia was depicted in the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind. He first studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, where he earned undergraduate and graduate degrees and a fellowship to Princeton University in 1950. He left to join the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1951, where he met and married Alicia Larde. They started a family, and by the end of the 1950s, Nash was gaining international celebrity for his mathematics. Then Nash’s behavior went from merely eccentric to delusional and problematic, and Alicia had him briefly committed to a psychiatric institution. Upon his release, Nash resigned from M.I.T. and went to Europe, but Alicia brought him back and they settled in Princeton. Although the couple divorced in 1963, Alicia continued to support Nash — as well as their son, John, who also struggled with schizophrenia. Nash slowly got better in the 1980s and reached a point of stability. He won a Nobel Prize in 1994 for work he’d done years earlier on game theory, sharing one third of the Economics prize. A 1998 book told his story and was the basis of the 2001 movie that starred Russell Crowe as Nash and Jennifer Connelly as Alicia. The couple remarried in 2001. In 2015, they were killed in an auto accident while riding in a taxi.