John Nash, the mathematician behind Game Theory, died in a car crash at 86. The Nobel Prize winner fought against Paranoid Schizophrenia and proved to the world anyone can accomplish anything. His legacy will live on through his students. (via wiki images)
Better late than never, my John Forbes Nash, Jr, eulogy.
The genius mathematician who created game theory, John Nash, died May 23rd, 2015, in a car crash at the age of 86. The theorist won many awards for his mathematics, including the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, despite battling with Paranoid Schizophrenia. He was the subject of an Academy Award-winning motion picture for his ‘Beautiful Mind.’ His work will continue to live on through his students and enthusiasts.
Nash studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and finished his graduate studies at Princeton University, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on Game Theory. He went on to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he began a battle with paranoid schizophrenia soon after. Campus students called Nash “The Phantom,” as he would walk the school paths, talking to himself and leaving complex math equations behind. He battled schizophrenia for roughly 30 years. He began to improve around the age of 60, and at 66, he won the Nobel Prize for his doctoral thesis some 40 years prior.
Nash’s work in Game Theory was significant, as it offered more flexibility than Dominant Theory for shorter-term strategizing. Dominant Theory calculates the probable outcome of a situation, independent of the actions of stakeholders. This works well for grand scale strategizing, such as determining economic trends and basic international relations concerns, but it is limited if a business owners, for example, wants to create a sound growth outlook. That’s where Game Theory comes in.
Game Theory allows someone to create a strategy while considering the probable actions of stakeholders. For this reason, it is considered the basic theory for calculating the outcome for a wide range of circumstances, including corporate strategies, product pricing, national security and life decisions, such as marriage and family planning. In fact, the Pentagon and U.S. Department of Defense have used game theory to strategize optimal tactics for handling threats to national security.
Game Theory is now a required class in many MBA programs and its reach will only continue to grow over time. Even Nash couldn’t predict the impact of his work some 60 years after its advent. The world has lost ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ but his work lives beyond him, proving too that even mentally ill patients can accomplish incredible things, one equation at a time.
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