Nobelist John Nash Speaks His Mind on Game Theory and His Life

March 13, 2009

Celebrated mathematician-economist John Nash, whose life inspired the film A Beautiful Mind, recently spoke about game theory to an audience at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

"While the subject matter seemed well over the heads of many," Dennis Taylor of the Monterey County Herald reported, "the large crowd seemed genuinely appreciative of the unique and amazing brain of John Nash."

"I was at a very early stage of my life [in Bluefield, W. Va.] when I became very interested in math and science," Nash recalled. "When I was in grade school, I liked doing larger additions and metric multiplications." High school presented no real challenge to Nash, but he also didn't finish at the top of his graduating class. Instead, Nash was one of two people voted "most original."

In 1945, at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University), in Pittsburgh, Nash arrived intent on majoring in electrical engineering. "But the mathematics department noticed that I was very good at math," Nash said. "They encouraged me to go in that direction."

Nash went on to develop groundbreaking ideas in game theory—the study of how competitors act, react, and interact in the strategic pursuit of their self-interest—and in differential geometry and partial differential equations, providing insight into the forces that govern chance and events inside complex systems in daily life. His theories still apply to market economics, computing, accounting, and military theory.

However, Nash, now 80, suffered what he termed "mental disturbances" in the late 1950s, a process he described as a "change from scientific rationality of thinking into the delusional thinking characteristic of persons who are psychiatrically diagnosed as 'schizophrenic' or 'paranoid schizophrenic.'"

"Schizophrenia is a diagnostic word," Nash said "Psychiatric disorder diagnostics is not exactly scientific. . . . Different people have different types of behavior, some of which is considered typical of schizophrenia. But if you could look into their brains, you might find that they are all quite different."

Nonetheless, in 1978, Nash was singled out for his scientific contributions when he was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize for his discovery of noncooperative equilibria, now called Nash equilibria. In 1994, he won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his game theory work as a graduate student at Princeton University in the early 1950s. In 1999, he was awarded him the Leroy P. Steele Prize from the American Mathematical Society.

Of the film that brought him to the attention of the world, Nash said, "A documentary it wasn't."

"When I first saw the movie, it started out very painfully for me," he said. Later, he realized that its purpose was to attract interest and be successful.

Source: Monterey County Herald, Feb. 20, 2009.