Life of John Forbes Nash - Research Paper Example

John Forbes Nash is an enigmatic figure in the recent history of mathematics and economics; on one hand, he produced unprecedented complexities in those fields, while on the other hand, overcame (and succumbed to) the problems of mental illness and disorder. Relatively unknown to the general public before the turn of the century, Nash became the subject of an intensely popular Hollywood film, A Beautiful Mind, loosely based on his life. Although the film focused primarily on Nash’s mastery mathematics and his paranoid schizophrenia, like Nash’s work in mathematics and economics, the facts of his life are far more complex than those that can be portrayed in any brief autobiography. After winning the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994, Nash’s approval in the field skyrocketed to the point where he is now one of the most revered figures in American academia, despite the problems that afflicted his personal life for decades around the middle of the 20th century (Nasar, 2001). But with this fame and reverence comes the likelihood of misunderstanding or inaccuracies; Nasar (2001) is now entering its ninth edition, partly due to biographical errors and misconstructions. An understanding of Nashs life is necessary to understand his work and his contributions to the fields of economics and game theory; part of this understanding is dispelling fact from fiction. Born on June 13th, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia, Nash grew up in a nurturing household that helped developed his talents and abilities. His father, for instance, gave him scientific volumes for his own personal study, which caused him to shun social activities at school as distractions. After receiving a Westinghouse scholarship, Nash began attending the Carnegie Institute of Technology and completed his Master’s degree in 1948 in mathematics with only three years of study completed. After his graduation, Nash began attending the University of Princeton, where he found himself amongst his peers in terms of academic and mathematical achievement (Nasar, 2001, pp. 46-47). During this time at Princeton, Nash expanded his idea of so-called “Nash Equilibrium”, which is a theorem in game theory that gained in popularity over the subsequent decades of Nash’s life. Again shunning classes, Nash became increasingly self-absorbed in his work. After receiving his Ph.D., Nash took a faculty position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was known primarily for his youth and his arrogance. During this time, Nash’s contribution to the fields of mathematics were immense. In essence, Nash was an extraordinary man. Having earned his Ph.D. in the time a normal student earns his Bachelor’s, the young man was on the verge of recognition as one of the leading mathematicians in the world before even reaching the age of 30. In fact, he was responsible for the sort and magnitude of achievements one sees in a particular field only a few times in a decade. The splendor of Nash’s ascent to the top of mathematics could only be rivaled by his subsequent mental decline into acute paranoid schizophrenia that led to his involuntary internment in a mental institution (Nash, 2004). In the subsequent three decades, roughly between 1960 and 1990, Nash remained both productive and mentally afflicted with his mental disease. Nasar (2001) expands upon this period with great detail, along with Nash’s gradual improvement from mental debilitation to mental genius. Nasar’s account of Nash’s life is unique in a number of ways, particularly because Nash himself led a very distinctive life and made novel contributions to a number of fields. First, although Nash made significant contributions to both mathematics and economics, he took no part in expanding on those ideas. In fact, Nash’s 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to him and two colleagues in economics who took Nash’s ideas and deepened the scientific community’s understanding of them. Thus, the biography of John Nash is an interesting read: for it is not the typical, formulaic biography of a scientist. Additionally, Nash’s personal life provides a richer backdrop for his scientific endeavors than the personal lives of most notable scientists from the past century. To this point, understanding Nash’s biography is crucial for placing his academic and intellectual achievements in their proper context. Like most biographies, Nasar (2001) attempts to balance between his personal story and the story of his science. But due to the remarkableness of Nash’s personal story, his biography is understandably dominated by accounts of his struggles with mental illness and personal loss. But through Nash, Nasar (2001) rightly approaches questions and issues that extend far beyond him alone. For instance, the work addresses the questions of moral respect for people who are not rational, how we ought to deal with disruptions caused by mentally ill employees, whether involuntary commitment of individuals to mental hospitals is ever justified, and whether painful treatments for mental illness are ethical (Nasar, 2001). In this context, one can read John Nash (and his biography) as a case study for a number of general issues within the scope of ethics and law. Giving Nash this credit for inadvertently supplying insight for issues in ethics and law would only extend his influence, which is already wrapped around various threads of thought in geometry, calculus, economics, and game theory. In Rubinstein (1995), the author comments on his scientific and personal achievements. With respect to his scientific achievements, she writes, “The other is my hope that this event will promote the unique characteristics of Nash’s style of economic modeling. Nash is the master of economic modeling” (Rubinstein, 1995, p. 10). In other words, Nash provided a way of modeling interactive reasoning, which is the theoretically fundamental level of thought behind every human being’s economic decisions. As such, this model provides the basis for all economic analysis, and Nash’s significance consists of the preciseness of this model as it applies to mathematics and economics (Rubinstein, 1995). In Myerson (1999), Nash is similarly regarded as a pioneer in the field. The author says, “Nashs formulation of non-cooperative game theory should be viewed as one of the great turning points in the long evolution of economics and social science” (p. 1080). Nash’s importance lies in his contribution to the discussion of how determinants of economic transactions in the realm of rational decision making come about. The economic models Nash proposed provided a lasting framework for the analyses of these decisions (Nash, 1997, p. xi). One of those models was the “Nash equilibrium”, which proposes that person A and person B are in Nash equilibrium if person A is making the best decision she can, taking into account person B’s decision, and person B is making the best decision he can, taking into account person A’s decision (Nash, 1950). Deceptively simple, this idea proved incredibly useful in the analysis of entities in an economic environment; it proved so influential, in fact, that Myerson (1999) remarks it is “comparable to that of the discovery of the DNA double helix in the biological sciences” (p. 1067). Clearly, Nash’s accomplishments are not short of praise in the present day, in which Nash himself is regarded both as a myth and a hero (Rubinstein, 1995, p. 13). A clearer understanding of the accomplishments of John Forbes Nash, Jr. is made possible through a more factual understanding of the man’s personal life, his struggles with mental illness, and his gradual recovery from the darkest holes of human existence. The paranoid schizophrenia that seized three decades of Nash’s life was only an obstacle to more recent years of internationally-recognized attainment, including being awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. In the minds of many scholars in the fields of mathematics and economics today, John Nash was perhaps the most influential figure in the past century (Myerson, 1999). Nash equilibrium and other proposals provided a major turning point in the history of economics; seeing these theories within an accurate context of Nash’s troubled personal life makes them all the more amazing. References Myerson, R. B. (1999). Nash Equilibrium and the History of Economic Theory. Journal of Economic Literature, 37, 1067-1082. Nasar, S. (2001). A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash (9th ed.). New York: Touchstone. Nash, J. (1950). Equilibrium points in n-person games. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 36, 48-49. Nash, J. (1997). Essays on Game Theory. New York: Edward Elgar Publishers. Nash, J. (2004, September 4). Interview with John Forbes Nash. (M. Griehsel, Interviewer) Rubinstein, A. (1995). John Nash: The Master of Economic Modeling. The Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 97, 9-13. Read More