'A Beautiful Mind' Mathematician John Nash Dies In Taxi Crash
He so impressed one professor that his letter of recommendation for Princeton had just one line: "This man is a genius."
Nash received his doctorate from Princeton in 1950 based on a dissertation on the fields of mathematics and economics.
In 1951, he joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, where he met his future wife, Alicia Larde, a student in his advanced calculus class. The daughter of a doctor, Larde's extended family "hobnobbed with the intelligentsia of El Salvador" before arriving in the United States in 1944. One of 16 women to enter the MIT class of 1955, a classmate described her as "an El Salvadoran princess with a sense of noblesse oblige."
They became a couple after spending time together in the university's music library, where Larde worked.
"He was very, very good looking, very intelligent," Alicia Nash told Nasar. "It was a little bit of a hero worship thing."
Nash began to experience what he called "the mental disturbances" in the early months of 1959, when Alicia Nash was pregnant, he wrote in his Nobel biography. Consequently, he resigned from his position as an MIT faculty member and spent 50 days under observation at the McLean Hospital in Massachusetts.
He spent the next few years in and out of hospitals, "always on an involuntary basis and always attempting a legal argument for release," he said -- despite Alicia Nash's efforts to keep him hospitalized. During periods of mental clarity, in which he was able to renounce his "delusional hypotheses," he returned to research that built his reputation as one of the most influential American mathematicians of his time.
Read Also:
