Sylvia Nasar's A beautiful mind (Simon and Schuster, 1998) explores some of these questions, and at its best provides considerable enlightenment. Relation between Nash's creativity and his subsequent "schizophrenic" behavior? What is game theory? What was the significance of Nash's contributions? How did he come upon these ideas? What was the significance of his subsequent work in mathematics? How did he come to be diagnosed as a "paranoid schizophrenic"? How did society treat such a person in the 1960s and 1970s? Is there any The "Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Honor of Alfred Nobel").Ī biography of Nash has the potential to enlighten the reader in several directions. In 1994 he shared with Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi the Nobel Prize in Economics (officially, Eventually, in his 60s, the latter periods came to dominate the former. His "schizophrenic" episodes were interspersed with periods of "enforced rationality" (his own term (Nash 1995, 278)). He spent time in mental hospitals, enduring treatments painful to read about. In his early 30s, he started to experience delusions and was diagnosed a Nash subsequently turned to other areas of mathematics, where he made enormous contributions. A few of John Nash's ideas, developed while he was a graduate student at Princeton from 1948 to 1950, transformed the field of game theory, and led to major developments in economic, political, and biological theories.
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