John Forbes Nash

John Forbes Nash Jr. (born June 13, 1928) is an American mathematician who works in game theory and differential geometry. He shared the 1994 Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences with two other game theorists, Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi.

A Beautiful Mind

The film A Beautiful Mind, released in 2001 and directed by Ron Howard, was inspired by Nash's life and received four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It is loosely based on the biography of the same title by Sylvia Nasar (1999), and has been criticized for its inaccurate portrayal of Nash's life and schizophrenia as well as for the over-simplified representation of the famous Nash equilibrium. The PBS documentary A Brilliant Madness attempts to portray his life more accurately.

Related Topics:
A Beautiful Mind - 2001 - Ron Howard - Academy Award - Best Picture - Biography - Sylvia Nasar - 1999 - Schizophrenia - Nash equilibrium - PBS

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The film's major departures from Nash's life and the Nasar biography include:

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• No mention of Nash's sexual adventures while at Rand and his second family in Boston — although his son from Boston plays a bit part in the movie, as a nurse manhandling Nash in the hospital.
• Nash joined Wheeler's lab at MIT after gaining his PhD from Princeton — however, there is no such lab at MIT. He was actually appointed as C.L.E. Moore Instructor at MIT.
• His preservation at Princeton is shown as exclusively the work of professors in the Mathematics department while in fact administrators, especially at Firestone Library and the Information Centers in later years, also played a role. They are unfortunately portrayed only as one library clerk who didn't get interoffice mail.
• Nash's hallucinations were exclusively auditory, and not both visual and auditory as shown in the film. It is true that his handlers, both from faculty and administration, had to introduce him to assistants and strangers.

A deleted scene from A Beautiful Mind reveals that Nash (re)invented the board game Hex.

Related Topics:
Board game - Hex

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