John Forbes Nash and the Beautiful Buddhist Number

John Forbes Nash Jr. was born in 1928 and is now probably the most recognized mathematician in America still living today. Nash won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994, and a best-selling book, A Beautiful Mind, by Sylvia Nasar was written about him and later made into a Hollywood movie (a quite mediocre and inaccurate film) by Ron Howard.

Nash's mathematical work involves the subjects of game theory, algebraic geometry, partial differential equations, and also a recreational interest in computer programming and number theory. He was born in West Virginia, the son of an electrical engineer and an English teacher. In his youth, Nash was quite precocious and read encyclopedias and other books while performing sophisticated science experiments in his room, always preferring to work in solitude. Also at a young age Nash read ET Bell's famous book, Men of Mathematics, and was particularly taken with the chapter on Pierre de Fermat - the lawyer and number theorist - which instigated Nash's interest in mathematics.

Young John attended public schools, but was also tutored by his mother outside of the classroom, which helped him later win a scholarship to attend the Carnegie Institute of Technology where he studied chemistry and chemical engineering. Later he switched to mathematics and headed off to prestigious Princeton University where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on non-cooperative games, which introduced and elucidated his now famous and widely referenced 'Nash equilibrium.' He also made valuable discoveries in algebraic geometry as well, writing a paper titled, "The Imbedding Problem For Riemannian Manifolds," which solved the long-standing problem of the same name.