When describing John Forbes Nash, Jr (13 June 1928 – 23 May 2015), it’s hard to be more succinct than Richard Duffin, a professor at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, who wrote, in his letter of recommendation to Princeton, that ‘this man is a genius’. It was 1948: Nash, having abandoned a degree in Chemical Engineering for one in Mathematics, was only just embarking on a journey that would ultimately make him one of the most famous mathematicians of the 20th Century. Despite the interest of Harvard University, Nash eventually decided to pursue his graduate studies at Princeton and it was there that he published the 317 word paper, Equilibrium points in N-person games, that introduced the Nash Equilibrium and won him the Nobel Prize for Economics (jointly with Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi) in 1994. As a result of this work in game theory, Nash was appointed to the RAND Corporation, which applied this relatively young field to the pressing policy issues of the time: nuclear weapons, the space race, the Cold War.
