"Beautiful Mind" John Nash, Wife Die in Jersey Cab Wreck

[RandySF]

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — John Forbes Nash Jr., a mathematical genius whose struggle with schizophrenia was chronicled in the 2001 movie "A Beautiful Mind," has died along with his wife in a car crash on the New Jersey Turnpike. He was 86.

Nash and Alicia Nash, 82, of Princeton Township, were killed in a taxi crash Saturday, state police said. A colleague who had received an award with Nash in Norway earlier in the week said they had just flown home and the couple had taken a cab home from the airport.

Russell Crowe, who portrayed Nash in "A Beautiful Mind," tweeted that he was "stunned."

"An amazing partnership," he wrote. "Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts."

Known as brilliant and eccentric, Nash was associated with Princeton University for many years, most recently serving as a senior research mathematician. He won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994 for his work in game theory, which offered insight into the dynamics of human rivalry. It is considered one of the most influential ideas of the 20th century.


http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/john-nash-wife-die-in-jersey-cab-wreck

[PowerToThePeople]

1. .

[haikugal]

2. What a loss..

[rogerashton]

3. I sat in on a talk by Nash in '04.

Lloyd Shapley, his old grad school classmate and fellow game theorist and mathematician, was with him. The NYT Obit is inaccurate on one important point. Von Neumann and Morgenstern did not limit their study to zero-sum games -- they originated the study of nonconstant sum games and 2/3 of the book was on that topic. But their approach assumed that when people could benefit by working together, they would work together cooperatively. That is, they assumed away opportunism. Nash assumed that people are always opportunistic. He did generalize the von Neumann-Morgenstern solution for zero-sum games in a different way than they had. It was not until the eighties that Nash' approach came to dominate economic applications of game theory.

[liberal_at_heart]

4. That is sad news.