John Nash (1) (1928–2015)

A native of Bluefield, West Virginia, Nash received his doctorate in mathematics from Princeton in 1950 and his graduate and bachelor’s degrees from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1948. He won the Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 1994 and joined the Princeton mathematics department in 1995. His honors include the American Mathematical Society’s 1999 Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research and the 1978 John von Neumann Theory Prize. Nash held membership in the National Academy of Sciences and in 2012 was an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Nash was in Norway late March 2015 to receive the 2015 Abel Prize for Mathematics. He and his wife Alicia Nash were on their way home from Norway on 05-23-2015 when the taxi in which they were passengers was involved in a motor vehicle accident, sustaining fatal injuries.

Nash’s mathematical genius and his schizophrenia were chronicled in the Pulitzer Prize-nominated book “A Beautiful Mind,” which was adapted into a movie starring Russell Crowe.