STUDENTS called him the “phantom”: an elusive, furtive figure who haunted Princeton’s libraries and lecture halls. The garbled formulae he scrawled on blackboards, uninvited and unread, evinced a scholarly background. Other jottings made even less sense: “Mao Tse-Tung’s Bar Mitzvah was 13 years, 13 months and 13 days after Brezhnev’s circumcision.” Sometimes he banged his head in mental agony. Myths abounded. Had maths broken his mind? Or a love affair his heart?
The numerology, conspiracies and supernatural beings arrived in John Nash’s mind with the same sparkling clarity as his insights into the isometric embeddability of abstract Riemannian manifolds in Euclidean spaces. Those thoughts had made him one of America’s most promising young mathematicians. So he took the other ones seriously, too.
His gift was insight, not theory—he solved problems first, finding out how he had done so later. His work on manifolds (crudely: proving that a line drawn on a multidimensional idealised piece of paper remains the same length no matter how tightly it is crumpled) could have won him the greatest mathematical prize, the Fields Medal, had an...
from The Economist: Obituary http://ift.tt/1LMyrjM
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