AN ODE TO JOHN AND ALICIA Two beautiful hearts

John and Alicia Nash

There's never been a shortage of drama with John Nash. With probably the shortest reference letter, 'this man is a genius' from Richard Duffin, his professor at Carnegie-Mellon, a 20-year old Nash arrived at Princeton in 1948 to start a PhD. Princeton was 'the' place to be if you were a mathematician in the 1940s and 1950s. It had the likes of John Von Neumann, Albert Einstein, Harold Kuhn and one Albert Tucker, with whom Nash would do his PhD.

Just eighteen months later, Nash submitted a 28-page dissertation in 1950. John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern laid the foundations of what's now known as Game Theory in 1944, but they failed to provide a solid solution to games. Nash's solution that would soon bear his name involved complex math, but the intuition is very simple.

Many people are playing a game where everybody's trying to do the best they can. Everybody considers what other people in the game are also doing. Now, if everybody's 'actually' doing their best given that each and every other player in the game is also 'actually' doing their best at the same time, would any one player want to move from their chosen decision? If you thought no, then probably everybody else will also think likewise. This would mean the game reaches a stable situation, the Nash Equilibrium.

The Nash Equilibrium was the best thing that happened to applied math since calculus, probability and econometrics. Initially, Nash's solution found applications in economics, and then in political sciences, military strategies to even biology to explain evolution. Nash's solution did have its limitations, but that only added to a challenge to refine it. However, it wasn't in Game Theory that Nash earned his reputation as a mathematician. Einstein's relativity theories and his own personal aura led to a growing interest in geometry amongst mathematicians in and outside Princeton. Nash's reputation was such that the larger the problem, the more tempting to think about a solution.

Before his mental illness, Nash had solved Reimann's problem in differential geometry now known as the Nash Embedded Theorem. He made seminal contributions in differential equations and topology. Before schizophrenia struck and kept Nash inactive for decades to come, the 'Kid Professor' had become the Newton and Einstein of his time all rolled into one.

John Nash's mental illness through schizophrenia by the 1960s and his almost unique ability to recover and make a comeback formed the myth of the 'Phantom of the Fine Hall' at Princeton and many other myths and legends. Sylvia Nasar first documented this as Beautiful Mind in 1998. The 2001 Hollywood movie under the same name with Russell Crowe made Nash a household name.

Nash's genius as the 'Beautiful Mind' is due to his wife, the 'beautiful soul', Alicia. In Alicia, the romance of Nash's legend rests. Although the two divorced in 1963, Alicia stood by John 'in thick and in thin' till they remarried in 2001 and till they tragically left the world together.

John Nash's reputation in the academia rests in economics and pure mathematics. With Alicia, his reputation rests on fighting schizophrenia, making a comeback, and then actively working together to raise awareness about mental illness. The world lost two 'beautiful hearts' on the fateful night of May 23, 2015.

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The writer teaches economic theory and game theory at Jahangirnagar University. He can be reached at: [email protected]