Nobel Prize Winner Whose Life Inspired "A Beautiful Mind" to Lecture at Penn State from 27 to 29 October

15 October 2003 -- John Forbes Nash, Jr., senior research mathematician at Princeton University, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994, and the person whose life inspired the book and movie titled "A Beautiful Mind," will present three free public lectures at the Penn State University Park campus from 27 to 29 October 2003. The lectures are sponsored by the Eberly College of Science.

Nash will give a lecture intended for a general audience titled "Ideal Money and Asymptotically Ideal Money" as the 2003-2004 John M. Chemerda Lecture in Science on Monday, 27 October, at 7:30 p.m. in Schwab Auditorium. In this lecture, he will discuss how the global competition of various monetary schemes and currencies may lead to the evolution of a system or systems of money of higher quality.

On Tuesday, 28 October, he will present a colloquium titled "An Interesting Equation with Relevance to Space-Time and Gravitational Waves" at 5:30 p.m. in 101 Thomas Building, preceded by a reception at 4:45 p.m. in the second-floor lobby of Thomas Building. This lecture, intended for students, researchers, and faculty, concerns a specific 4th-order covariant tensor equation and its possible interest in relation to generalized theories of space-time and gravitational waves.

On Wednesday, 29 October, Nash will give a lecture titled "Studying Cooperative Games by Modeling the Actions of the Players in a Non-Cooperative Game Involving Agencies" as the 2003 Khatri Memorial Lecture at 5:30 p.m. in 119 Osmond Laboratory. During this lecture, Nash will discuss a new computational approach to the old challenge of understanding cooperation through the study of the selfishly motivated actions of individual participants.

Nash's most important scientific work is perhaps his establishment of the mathematical principles of modern game theory, which he accomplished during a five-year period beginning with his doctoral thesis in 1949. In four papers published between 1950 and 1953, he made seminal contributions to both noncooperative game theory and bargaining theory. For his landmark work on the mathematics of game theory he shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics with Hungarian-American economist John Harsanyi and German mathematician Reinhard Selten. The 27-page dissertation by the then 21-year-old Nash had enormous impact and spawned much of the subsequent literature on noncooperative game theory, which has since grown at a prodigious rate--threatening, some claim, to overwhelm much of the overall field of economics.

He also is well known as a result of his biography, "A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, 1994," written by Sylvia Nasar, which was made into a Hollywood film, titled "A Beautiful Mind," in which the actor Russell Crowe portrayed John Nash. He also is the author of a book published in 1997, titled "Essays on Game Theory."

Nash studied chemical engineering, chemistry, and mathematics as a George Westinghouse Scholar at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie-Mellon University, where he was awarded both B.S. and M.S. degrees in 1948. He received a Ph.D. degree in mathematics at Princeton University in 1950, then taught there for one year in the faculty position of instructor of mathematics. From 1951 to 1959, he was a faculty member, the C.L.E. Moore Instructor of Mathematics, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then held temporary academic positions during the years between 1956 and 1962. During the periods from 1956 to 1957 and from 1961 to 1964 he was a member of the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. He joined the faculty at Princeton University as a senior research mathematician in 1995.

In addition to the 1994 Nobel memorial prize in economics and many prestigious scholarships and foundation awards, Nash's honors include the 1978 John Von Neumann Theory Prize of the Operations Research Society and the Institute for Management Science, the 1998 Business Week award at Erasmus University in The Netherlands., and the 1999 Steele prize of the American Mathematical Society.

He was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1990 and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1996 and he received an honorary doctorate degree in science and technology from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1999.

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