Alumnus John Nash

The Department of Mathematical Sciences extends its deepest sympathies to the family of alumnus John F. Nash, Jr., who died along with his wife in a car accident on Saturday, May 23. John Nash's death came less than a week after he received the 2015 Abel Prize.

The Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters awarded the AbelPrize for 2015 to John F. Nash, Jr. and Louis Nirenberg "for striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis." While the Fields medal is considered the highest honor in mathematics, the Fields medal is restricted to mathematicians under the age of 40. The Abel prize, considered the equivalent of a Noble Prize, is the most important prize honoring contributions to mathematics over the course of a career.

John Nash received bachelor and masters degrees in mathematics from Carnegie Tech in 1948. He went on to complete his Ph.D. at Princeton and to make seminal contributions in a number of areas. Nash was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 1994 for his work on non-cooperative games. The work on game theory is distinct from the work on partial differential equations and geometric analysis that was recognized by the Abel prize.