JOHN NASH may be best known for being portrayed by Russell Crowe in the biopic “A Beautiful Mind”, but his essential and lasting contribution is in the world of economics. In 1994 he shared the Nobel prize in the field with two other scholars for work in “game theory”, which helps individuals and firms understand the way their own decisions affect the decisions of others (see article).
Yet until his untimely death on May 23rd, aged 86, Mr Nash was always first and foremost a mathematician. When he and his wife were killed in a car crash in New Jersey, they were on their way home from the airport after a trip to Norway, where days earlier he had picked up the Abel prize, one of the field’s most illustrious, for advances in the theory of “non-linear partial differential equations” (he shared it with Louis Nirenberg of New York University).
In pure maths, where Mr Nash turned his attention after his game-theory work in the early 1950s, such equations are used to analyse abstract geometric objects, such as “submanifolds of...Continue reading
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