John Forbes Nash Jr.

In 1952, John Nash was in a relationship with a nurse named Eleanor Stier. However, when Eleanor got pregnant with the young mathematician's son, John David Stier, she was left to fend for herself.

Two years later, he was arrested in California, for his homosexual encounters in a public toilet. He was released from prison soon, but the exceptional mathematician lost his job at the 'RAND Corporation'.

In February 1957, Nash got married to a physics graduate from 'MIT', Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Lardé, according to Roman Catholic customs and the couple had a son, John Charles Martin.

John Forbes Nash Jr. was born to an electrical engineer having the same name, and his wife, Margaret Virginia Martin, a former school teacher, in the town of Bluefield, West Virginia, on June 13, 1928. The young boy had a younger sibling, Martha, who was born approximately two and a half years later.

On completing high school, John went on to pursue a course in chemical engineering from the 'Carnegie Institute of Technology', presently known as the 'Carnegie Mellon University'. Here, he changed courses to chemistry and subsequently earned both a B.S. and an M.S. in mathematics in 1948, due to his academic brilliance.

He earned a 'John S. Kennedy scholarship' to the prestigious 'Princeton University', where he specialised in the equilibrium theory in mathematics. In 1950, the young man was able to graduate with a doctorate degree for his research on 'non-cooperative games'.

During this time, he published dissertation papers like 'Equilibrium Points in N-person Games', 'The Bargaining Problem', and 'Non-cooperative Games’.

Around the same time, he was hired as a consultant by the ‘RAND Corporation’, where he conducted major research studies on ‘Game Theory’. In 1951, Nash began working for the ‘Massachusetts Institute of Technology’ (‘MIT’) as a temporary mathematics teacher.

In 1952, he published his work on other areas of mathematics, in the paper, 'Real algebraic manifolds'. The following year, the thesis paper, 'Two-person Cooperative Games', based on his research conducted at ‘Princeton University’ was also published.

While working on a problem related to German mathematician David Hilbert's 'elliptic partial differential equations', John got acquainted with Italian, Ennio de Giorgi in 1956. Both Nash and Giorgi formulated the proof for the equation, a few months away from each other, and thus both missed out on the 'Fields Medal'.

In 1958, he began working as a lecturer on a probationary term, at the 'MIT'. By the following year, his work started getting hampered owing to symptoms of mental illness, which became quite evident after his incoherent speech at the 'American Mathematical Society' of 'Columbia University'.

In 1959, the brilliant mathematician was forced to resign from his post at the ‘Massachusetts Institute of Technology’, and was sent to the ‘McLean Hospital’, to get treatment for suspected schizophrenia.

Amongst all mathematical research conducted by this genius, the one that brought him fame, and the ‘Nobel Prize’, is his work on ‘Game Theory’. The ‘Game Theory’ has become a significant area of study in the field of economics, and it describes how participants of a game take decisions individually or collectively to arrive at a win-win situation.