John Nash

John Nash Biography John Nash (June 13, 1928 – present) is a brilliant mathematician, specializing in economics. He was born n Westfield, West Virginia, into a family of three, he, his father – an electrical engineer, and his mother – a school teacher who pushed him to do many great things that led to his superb education and extraordinary mind. As a child, he had a quiet and withdrawn personality, but was very intelligent. He started reading at four, skipped a grade, and even learned Latin, all of which his mother pressed on him. As he grew up, he became aware of how smart he was and could be seen by some as being arrogant and an introvert. In his eyes, extracurricular activity such as music and sports were a waste of time and distracted him from his math and science studies. Starting in the fourth grade, his aptitude for mathematics became evident when he would solve complicated problems easily in front of the teachers’ eyes. Nash went to Carnegie Institute of Technology under a George Westinghouse Scholarship, with a George Westinghouse Award, which was only given to ten people. He studied chemical engineering, but disliked it and switched to chemistry. From chemistry, he switched again to mathematics to where he found his passion. He ended up with a Masters Degree and a Bachelor Degree in mathematics. Harvard University accepted him, but the chairman of Princeton University wrote him and persuaded him. The proximity to home was what pushed him over to go to Princeton. Not long after he got there, he got into a field of strategizing – called game theory. Game theory is the study of making decisions that affect the outcome of all the players in the game, while similarly, a decision made by any other player in the game will affect your outcome as well. He also created a theory known as the Nash equilibrium, which applied to game theory. The definition of Nash equilibrium is a situation in which if one player changes his or her decision, but all the other players