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John Nash

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John Nash, formally John Forbes Nash Jr., was an American mathematician who gave non cooperative game theory a rigorous mathematical foundation. In his 1950 Princeton PhD thesis he defined what is now called the Nash equilibrium and proved, using Kakutani's fixed point theorem, that every finite non cooperative game has at least one such equilibrium. He also did celebrated work in pure mathematics on real algebraic manifolds and nonlinear partial differential equations, winning the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his game theory work and the 2015 Abel Prize for his mathematics.

Facts
Birth Date
1928-06-13 1
Birth Year
1928 1
Death Date
2015-05-23 1
Death Year
2015 1
Birthplace
Bluefield, West Virginia, United States 1
Death Place
New Jersey, United States 1
Died in a car accident on the New Jersey Turnpike, along with his wife Alicia Nash; exact township not separately verified today.
Nationality / Culture
American 1
Defining Contribution
Proved the existence of equilibrium in every finite non cooperative game, the Nash equilibrium, in his 1950 PhD thesis and 1951 paper. 2
Notable Work
C-1 Isometric Imbeddings and The Imbedding Problem for Riemannian Manifolds (1954, 1956), foundational work on nonlinear partial differential equations 1
Notable Work
Non-Cooperative Games (PhD thesis 1950, paper 1951) 2
Award
1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi, for the analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games. 3
Award
2015 Abel Prize, shared with Louis Nirenberg, for striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis. 4
Cross-Tradition Connections

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Sources
1. MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive
University of St Andrews, School of Mathematics and Statisticshttps://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Nash/
Quote, https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Nash/
John Nash was an American mathematician who won the Nobel Prize for Economics for his work in game theory.
View the Source
2. Nash, Non-Cooperative Games (1951)
John Nash, Annals of Mathematics, vol. 54, 1951
3. The Nobel Prize, Official Site
The Nobel Foundation
4. The Abel Prize, Official Site
The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters
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