His mathematics skills were recognized at a young age, and his parents arranged for him to take extra classes at the local Bluefield College while still in high school.
In 1945 Nash won one of 10 George Westinghouse Scholarship in a national competition and entered Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, majoring in chemical engineering.
Harvard University and Princeton University offered him fellowships; he chose Princeton because it was closer to home and they seemed more eager to have him come to the school.
He entered Princeton in 1948, where he pursued broad interests in several branches of pure mathematics, including topology, algebraic, geometry, game theory and mathematical logic.
John Nash was renowned for his works in game theory, differential geometry and partial differential equations.
In 1994, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, which he shared with the mathematical economists and game theorist Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi.
In 1978, Nash was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize for his invention of non cooperative equilibria, now called Nash equilibria and in 1999 Nash was awarded the Leroy P. Steele Prize by the American Mathematical Society.
John Nash passed away on 23 May 2015. He was 86 and died in a car crash along with his wife Alicia Nash in New Jersey.
John Forbes Nash, Jr. (June 13, 1928 – May 23, 2015)
