Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, December 9, 1994 TAG: 9501120004
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-22 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Nash this fall won a share of the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science - for a slim, 27-page Princeton University doctoral thesis written nearly 50 years ago.
The game-theory mathematics in which he did pioneering work has had major influence on economics - and also on everything from ethics to biology to military strategics. It has also filtered into everyday English: "Zero-sum game," to describe a situation in which the "score" for one "player" can be increased only at the equivalent expense of the others, is a game-theory contribution to the language.
Nash's brilliant career in the late '40s and '50s, at Princeton University, MIT and the RAND Corp., was cut short by mental illness that disabled him for nearly three decades - until, about 10 years ago, it went into rare remission.
Now in his middle 60s, Nash was reared in Bluefield, W.Va., the son of a high-school Latin teacher and an Appalachian Power Co. engineer. Nash's father was transferred to Roanoke after Nash had left home for college. Nash now lives in Princeton, N.J., but during parts of his illness, lived with family in Roanoke.
John von Neumann, a native of Hungary who moved to the United States in 1929, is generally regarded as the father of game theory. But if von Neumann came first, author William Poundstone observes in "Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory, and the Puzzle of the Bomb," Nash was next.
Von Neumann's had proved with mathematical rigor the theorem that for all two-player, zero-sum games - from tic-tac-toe to chess - there exist optimal strategies for each player given the strategy of the other player.
Building on von Neumann, Nash worked on games with more than two players and on non-zero-sum games. He proved the existence of "equilibrium points" in such games - points, that is, where each player can come away feeling he has done as well as possible under the circumstances.
Then came Nash's affliction - paranoid schizophrenia, a divorce from reality that is debilitating and extremely difficult to treat. The fact that his family and friends continued to protect and nurture him, suggested The New York Times last month, may have contributed to the illness's unexpected remission in recent years.
Still, it's a bittersweet thing. Nash emerged from the darkness, and that's to be cheered. But the illness robbed the world of 30 years of genius, which is regrettable.
by CNB