Goodbye John Nash: For the first time in Game Theory one man’s loss is everyone else’s too

By NewsGram Staff Writer

J.F. Nash is a name that'll send a bell ringing in everyone's mind if for no better reason than just because of the Oscar-winning Russell Crowe movie. Those who can associate with the name will realize the loss humanity has suffered.

John Nash and his wife Alicia Nash passed away in a fatal taxi crash on the New Jersey Turnpike, on Saturday.

The demise of the renowned Mathematician will be a great blow to blackjack players, economists and writers banking on Nash's ideas to explore the relation between God and game theory, to say the least.

Nash's contribution to Game Theory, like the Nash Equilibrium, Nash Program and Bargaining problem helped bring the theory out of obscurity and into the application based world of economics.

Nash is the classic case of 'disturbed' genius. Born in Bluefield, West Virginia, United States, he was awarded the George Westinghouse Scholarship, a full scholarship to the Carnegie Institute of Technology at the age of 16. In April, 1959, Nash was admitted to McLean Hospital, where he was subsequently diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

John Nash won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 because of his 27-page dissertation, "Non-Cooperative Games," written in 1950 when he was 21.

John Nash's life and works are reminiscent of the common ground between Genius and madness and how people at that juncture place constantly face torture and deliverance at the same time.