BRAVE HEARTS-John Forbes Nash, Jr.

John Forbes Nash,Jr.  (born June 13, 1928),

 is an American mathematician and economist. He shared the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with game theorists Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi.In Princeton campus legend, Nash became "The Phantom of Fine Hall" (Fine Hall is Princeton's mathematics center), a shadowy figure who would scribble arcane equations on blackboards in the middle of the night.Nash's recent work involves ventures in advanced game theory, including partial agency, that show that, as in his early career, he prefers to select his own path and problems. Between 1945 and 1996, he published 23 scientific studies.In 1951, Nash went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a C. L. E. Moore Instructor in the mathematics faculty. There, he met Alicia López-Harrison de Lardé (born January 1, 1933), a physics student from El Salvador, whom he married in February 1957. Alicia admitted Nash to a mental hospital in 1959 for schizophrenia. He began to show signs of extreme paranoia and his wife later described his behavior as becoming increasingly erratic, stating that he began speaking of characters who were putting him in danger. Nash mailed letters to foreign embassies in Washington, D.C. declaring that he was establishing a world government.He was involuntarily admitted into the McLean Hospital, April–May 1959, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and mild clinical depression.He was in and out of mental hospitals until 1970, being given insulin shock therapy and antipsychotic medications, usually as a result of being involuntarily committed. After 1970 he was never committed to the hospital again and never took antipsychotic medication again.Nash recovered gradually with the passage of time. Encouraged by his then former wife, Alicia, Nash worked in a communitarian setting where his eccentricities were accepted Nash has suggested his delusional thinking was related to his unhappiness, and his striving to feel important and be recognized, and to his characteristic way of thinking such that "I wouldn't have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally."Nash is also the subject of the Hollywood movie, A Beautiful Mind, which was nominated for eight Oscars (winning four), and was based on the biography of the same name about him, his mathematical genius and his struggle with schizophrenia. His theories are still used today in market economics, computing, accounting and military theory.