John Forbes Nash, Jr. (June 13, 1928 - May 23, 2015) was an American mathematician whose works in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations provided insight into the factors that govern chance and events inside complex systems in daily life. He was born in in Bluefield, West Virginia and attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT; now Carnegie Mellon University) with a full scholarship, the George Westinghouse Scholarship, and initially majored in chemical engineering, but eventually switched to mathematics. After graduating in 1948 with a B.S. degree and an M.S. degree, both in mathematics, Nash accepted a scholarship to Princeton University, where he pursued graduate studies in mathematics. In 1950 he earned his Ph.D. with a dissertation on non-cooperative games, known as "Game Theory". This won Nash the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994. In 2010, Nash won the Double Helix Medal.
Nash's theories are still in widespread use in the fields of economics, computing, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, politics and military theory. Serving as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton University during the latter part of his life, he shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi.
In 1959, Nash began showing clear signs of mental illness, and spent several years at psychiatric hospitals and was treated for paranoid schizophrenia. After 1970, his condition slowly improved, allowing him to return to academic work by the mid-1980s. His struggles with his illness and his recovery became the basis for Sylvia Nasar's biography, A Beautiful Mind, as well as a film of the same name starring Russell Crowe.
In May 2015, Nash went to Norway with his wife, Alicia de Lardé Nash, to accept the Abel Prize. Upon his return to New Jersey on May 23, Nash and his wife, while riding in a taxi on the New Jersey Turnpike after leaving Newark Airp