I still remember when John Nash and his contributions to game theory first caught my imagination. I was in a university class in which the tutor was explaining the (non-cooperative) Nash equilibrium concept. He also told us that John Nash was a brilliant mathematician and such was the sophistication of his doctoral thesis that it was unusually short. Further, that Nash had struggled with severe mental health problems for much of his adult life, although he was fortunate to make a sufficient recovery to accept his 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in Stockholm in person.
Born in 1928 in West Virginia, USA, Nash initially enrolled as an undergraduate at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now known as Carnegie Mellon University) to study chemical engineering, before switching to chemistry and then to mathematics. He received both his undergraduate and master’s degrees in mathematics when he was 20 years old, going on to complete his doctorate in mathematics at Princeton University in just 2 years, when he was 22.
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