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You are here: Home / Absent Friends / RIP / RIP John Nash

RIP John Nash

by Tom Levenson|  May 24, 20157:15 pm| 44 Comments

This post is in: RIP

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John_Forbes_Nash,_Jr._by_Peter_Badge

 

Sad news out of New Jersey today:

John Forbes Nash Jr., a mathematical genius whose struggle with schizophrenia was chronicled in the 2001 movie “A Beautiful Mind,” has died along with his wife in a car crash on the New Jersey Turnpike. He was 86.

Nash and Alicia Nash, 82, of Princeton Township, were killed in a taxi crash Saturday, state police said. A colleague who had received an award with Nash in Norway earlier in the week said they had just flown home and the couple had taken a cab home from the airport.

Nash was the subject of Sylvia Nasar’s wonderful biography, also called A Beautiful Mind, and that’s the place to go for a full treatment of who he was and what his work and life contained.  Here’s a tl:dr gloss on his life prepared for the Abel Prize ceremony this year.   Nash was one of the 2015 laureates; and the crash came on the final leg of his return home from the Abel ceremony in Oslo.

He had a hard life; Alicia Nash too — it’s not remotely easy to be the pillar. I don’t think the word “hero” works in the frame of illness and recovery (think what it says about those who don’t make it back) — but there’s no doubt that Nash had led an extraordinary life, one that demanded unimaginable stamina and effort.

Mine isn’t a helpful reaction — but what an infuriatingly random way to lose those lives.

Got nuthin else.  Over to you.

Image: via Wikipedia Commons

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44Comments

  1. 1.

    Valdivia

    May 24, 2015 at 7:19 pm

    So beautifully said Tom. I was sad to hear it.

  2. 2.

    SiubhanDuinne

    May 24, 2015 at 7:27 pm

    Heard this on NPR earlier today. Very sad news — and, as you say, there’s something just wrong about the banality and randomness of a taxi accident. The undying Romantic in me always wants heroic people to depart in a heroic way.

    May John and Alicia both rest peacefully.

  3. 3.

    Major Major Major Major

    May 24, 2015 at 7:28 pm

    I was just about to post this. RIP.

    But uh, you know, at least they went together.

  4. 4.

    Baud

    May 24, 2015 at 7:28 pm

    He advanced humanity. What else can you ask for?

  5. 5.

    SiubhanDuinne

    May 24, 2015 at 7:29 pm

    @efgoldman:

    I’ll bet Paul Krugman knew him, and I expect he’ll have a fine eulogy tomorrow in his column or blog.

  6. 6.

    Valdivia

    May 24, 2015 at 7:29 pm

    @Major Major Major Major:

    I was going to say, as the undying romantic that I am, that I thought this too.

  7. 7.

    Major Major Major Major

    May 24, 2015 at 7:36 pm

    Erdős Number: 3
    John Nash was played by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind
    Russell Crowe and Hugh Jackman were in Les Miz
    Hugh Jackman and Kevin Bacon were in X-Men: First Class

    Erdős-Bacon number: 6

    That’s quite low. Natalie Portman is a 7, fun fact.

  8. 8.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    May 24, 2015 at 7:40 pm

    Comedian Anne Meara also died, though no cause of death was given by the family:

    http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2015/may/24/anne-meara-ben-jerry-stiller-dies

    Gen-Xers and younger probably know her best as Ben Stiller’s mother, but she was half of the comedy team of Stiller & Meara in the 1950s and 1960s. She and Jerry Stiller were married for close to 50 years.

    ETA: I underestimated — they were married for 61 years.

  9. 9.

    Mr Stagger Lee

    May 24, 2015 at 7:41 pm

    I read the book as well as saw the movie, one question, I love movies that deal with genius as well as the sometime struggles that accompany it. Are there any other movies similar? The Imitation Game was good for it’s portrayal of Alan Turing and what he was dealt with. Amedeus, I know mostly fiction but it showed Mozart as a genius who had some issues..Are there any others one can reccommend?

  10. 10.

    Elie

    May 24, 2015 at 7:43 pm

    He/they advanced humanity and hopefully, did not suffer long in their passing. We are all here temporarily. I am sure that he had his suffering and struggles… having severe mental illness and having a partner with it without a doubt shape your life. But he also had good things — recognition for his contributions and each had a committed partner in each other — no matter what. That aint small potatoes.

    I celebrate their meaningful lives…

  11. 11.

    Germy Shoemangler

    May 24, 2015 at 7:44 pm

    @Mr Stagger Lee: Immortal Beloved? (about Beethoven) Shakespeare In Love?

    Both good films.

  12. 12.

    Major Major Major Major

    May 24, 2015 at 7:44 pm

    @Mr Stagger Lee: The book, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, about Paul ErdÅ‘s (the most published mathematician in history, also noted amphetamine addict) is quite good. As is The Professor and the Madman, about the unlikely friendship between the man who created the OED and a fellow who’d been locked up in a British asylum.

  13. 13.

    Starfish

    May 24, 2015 at 7:56 pm

    I’ve been reading Nasar’s book for about a month. I have 30 pages left to go. This morning, I was talking to a friend about how great the book was, and he told me that the Nash’s died.

    The interesting thing about Nasar’s book is that Nash is a generally unlikeable character until he gets sick. She tries to treat him fairly by pointing out when people had different perspectives on interactions with Nash.

  14. 14.

    Valdivia

    May 24, 2015 at 7:56 pm

    @Mr Stagger Lee:
    I think there’s one about Clara Schumann ( have to look the name up). Last year there was a German movie about the poet Schiller and a love triangle called Beloved Sisters. Also there’s Impromptu about Sand and Chopin.

  15. 15.

    sempronia

    May 24, 2015 at 8:00 pm

    A Beautiful Mind came out when I was a med student. Our psych professors bought us all tickets to the movie and held a lecture in the theater immediately afterwards to talk about schizophrenia. That was cool.

    I still hate Russell Crowe, though.

  16. 16.

    SiubhanDuinne

    May 24, 2015 at 8:02 pm

    @Mr Stagger Lee:

    Staying with mathematics, there’s Proof. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_(2005_film)

  17. 17.

    divF

    May 24, 2015 at 8:03 pm

    A sad day. The Abel prize writeup you linked to is pretty accurate. It did give me a piece of his biography I hadn’t known, which is his connection to the Courant Institute at NYU in the late 50’s. His friendship with Louis Nirenberg goes back to to that time, making it all the more heartbreaking that this occurred just after they had traveled back together from being jointly awarded the Abel prize in Norway.

    After the Sylvia Nasar biography came out, but I think before the movie, I was having dinner out with a colleague in Princeton. The waitress overheard us talking math, and whispered to us that John Nash was having dinner here, a few tables over (as indeed he was, with his wife and another couple). He was a celebrity in Princeton, even then.

  18. 18.

    Mnemosyne (tablet)

    May 24, 2015 at 8:09 pm

    @Mr Stagger Lee:

    Last year’s “The Theory of Everything.” Eddie Redmayne won the Oscar for playing Stephen Hawking.

  19. 19.

    BillinGlendaleCA

    May 24, 2015 at 8:17 pm

    @Mnemosyne (tablet): First time I remember seeing them was Blue Nun commercials in the 70’s.

  20. 20.

    rikyrah

    May 24, 2015 at 8:24 pm

    RIP, Mr. Nash.

  21. 21.

    Trentrunner

    May 24, 2015 at 8:28 pm

    Genius, yes, but apparently not smart enough to WEAR A GODDAMN SEATBELT.

  22. 22.

    Villago Delenda Est

    May 24, 2015 at 8:37 pm

    And still the vile thing that is Dick Cheney is animated.

  23. 23.

    PurpleGirl

    May 24, 2015 at 8:39 pm

    @divF:

    … his connection to the Courant Institute at NYU …

    I did not know he had connections to the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. I worked as a mathematical typist at the Courant for a few years.

    RIP John and Alicia Nash.

  24. 24.

    Suzanne

    May 24, 2015 at 8:43 pm

    I mused upon how this man had so many struggles in life, and dying because he forgot to wear a seatbelt on the New Jersey Turnpike seems like an extra cruelty.

  25. 25.

    PurpleGirl

    May 24, 2015 at 8:48 pm

    @PurpleGirl: I’m not being permitted to edit my previous comment. Interesting fact about Richard Courant. He was in the German army in WWI. One of his most important publications and research areas was Partial Differential Equations. He essentially founded mathematical physics in the years following WWI. Then came the Nazis… the Nazis collected all the copies of his books and burned them. (Ya know, Jewish science.) By 1944 or so, the Nazis had to smuggle back in Germany copies of Principles of Mathematical Physics because their scientists needed it for their rocketry work and related research.

    Friends convinced Courant to leave Germany and looked for teaching positions for him in England and New York City. He ended up at NYU because other schools looked askance at hiring a Jewish professor. Investor Warren Weaver talked NYU into hiring him. The Courant building is Warren Weaver Hall.

  26. 26.

    Kathy Gustafson

    May 24, 2015 at 8:55 pm

    @Mr Stagger Lee: Pi

    I much preferred the book. Particularly how the academic community sheltered him.

  27. 27.

    a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)

    May 24, 2015 at 9:09 pm

    @divF: What a cool waitress you had.

  28. 28.

    divF

    May 24, 2015 at 9:36 pm

    @PurpleGirl:
    I hope you read this. Courant is my second home, professionally. My thesis advisor received his Ph.D. there in the 60’s, and my field of mathematics has its roots there (as you might have already guessed from my nym). I have many friends of my own generation who are on the faculty there.

  29. 29.

    divF

    May 24, 2015 at 9:39 pm

    @a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): Yeah, that is why I’m pretty sure this was before the movie came out. I remember my colleague and I being surprised that Nash would have such rock-star status.

  30. 30.

    divF

    May 24, 2015 at 9:57 pm

    @PurpleGirl:
    I have both volumes of Courant and Hilbert on my bookshelf, and read them often just for pleasure. I also have a copy of volume II in German from 1943, printed in the U.S. under license from the Alien Property Custodian.

    The possession I most envy, though, is one that a colleague has. It is one of the 300 numbered and declassified typewritten versions of what would later become Courant and Friedrichs’ Supersonic Flow and Shock Waves, in its initial form as a classified report from WW II.

    ETA: Is your nym related to your connection to NYU ?

  31. 31.

    chopper

    May 24, 2015 at 10:01 pm

    @BillinGlendaleCA:

    Oh god, Blue Nun. “The wine so bad it made the news”.

  32. 32.

    Zinsky

    May 24, 2015 at 10:09 pm

    Although 86 years is a long life, especially for a man, it seems like an inelegant, incongruous ending for such a complex person. Pity.

  33. 33.

    dopey-o

    May 24, 2015 at 10:55 pm

    @Trentrunner:

    Genius, yes, but apparently not smart enough to WEAR A GODDAMN SEATBELT.

    Do taxicabs in NJ have seatbelts? They are not legally required in many jurisdictions as a practical matter: How does the cabbie who depends on tips ENFORCE a seatbelt law?
    Terrible that a couple who weathered schizophrenia should perish this way. No comfort, no closure, just violent death.

  34. 34.

    fuckwit

    May 24, 2015 at 11:52 pm

    @Major Major Major Major: i love this comment very, very much.

  35. 35.

    Librarian

    May 25, 2015 at 12:19 am

    @Mr Stagger Lee: “Perfect Rigor”, Masha Gessen’s biography of Grigorii Perelman.

  36. 36.

    Cervantes

    May 25, 2015 at 10:44 am

    @PurpleGirl:

    Investor Warren Weaver talked NYU into hiring him. The Courant building is Warren Weaver Hall.

    It was a young NYU mathematician by the name of Donald Flanders who got Courant his position there. This was in the early ’30s — in the Math Department, which Flanders wanted greatly to improve.

    Courant soon wanted to build a separate “institute of science” as he had done in Germany, but this did not happen until decades later, in the early ’50s, when the Atomic Energy Commission was ready to fund institutional space and support for a computer and Courant practically forced the choice of NYU as the location (even though it had already been rejected).

    Ironic, because Courant until that time had evinced little understanding of what computers could do in applied mathematics and kept referring to them as “the emperor’s new clothes.” Warren Weaver — this was Weaver of “Shannon and Weaver” — had a much better grasp of what was coming.

    Speaking of Weaver, he was not exactly an “investor.” He was a mathematician, once head of the department at Wisconsin. Not trusting in his own intellectual gifts, he went into research administration at the Rockefeller Foundation in New York. Courant appealed to him for help and, even though applied math was not really on the Foundation’s agenda, Weaver accorded NYU a small grant — a few thousand dollars — for a number of years. This was all before the war. In the war years, Weaver went to work for the government. The Courant Institute was finally created in the early ’50s when the AEC opportunity came along.

    As to why the Courant building is called “Warren Weaver Hall”: After the war, when Weaver eventually retired from the Rockefeller Foundation he went to work for Alfred P. Sloan — think General Motors — whose foundation supported applied math research around the country. Sloan was quite happy to “get” a man of Weaver’s experience and influence. In the early ’60s, Sloan arranged for a huge grant to the Courant Institute — several million dollars — and Weaver’s name came firmly attached to it.

  37. 37.

    Cervantes

    May 25, 2015 at 11:25 am

    @Mr Stagger Lee:

    I love movies that deal with genius as well as the sometime struggles that accompany it. Are there any other movies similar?

    I think it depends on how you see genius.

    Was Lincoln a genius? How about Steve Jobs?

    There are books and movies about them, and others.

  38. 38.

    Bill

    May 25, 2015 at 11:45 am

    Upon hearing of Nash’s death, I vaguely remembered news stories about him being anti-Semitic. Seeing the glowing reports of his life in the last 24 hours, I was surprised that I wasn’t seeing more about that part of his life. I went back and did some research only to discovery the anti-Semetic stories originated with Drudge, and were probably part of a whisper campaign top discredit A Beautiful Mind’s Oscar chances. Apparently Nash did write some terrible things while in the grips of his disease, but most attributed them to the disease rather than the man.

    The episode reminds me of how effective disinformation can be. I try to stay fairly well informed, but all the stuck with me about Nash was Drudge’s BS story. Not the response, or more importantly any recollection about they completely unreliable source. Thank goodness for the google machine.

  39. 39.

    Cervantes

    May 25, 2015 at 11:52 am

    @divF:

    After the Sylvia Nasar biography came out, but I think before the movie, I was having dinner out with a colleague in Princeton. The waitress overheard us talking math, and whispered to us that John Nash was having dinner here, a few tables over (as indeed he was, with his wife and another couple). He was a celebrity in Princeton, even then.

    Yes. Even before the Nobel-related spate of publicity in ’94, given the decades of erratic, puzzling, and heart-breaking behavior, he was widely known and recognized locally, among townies as well. (And who’s to say your waitress was not a student or some such?)

    The Nasar biography was published in ’98. I don’t know when the movie came out.

  40. 40.

    Cervantes

    May 25, 2015 at 12:31 pm

    @Bill:

    Upon hearing of Nash’s death, I vaguely remembered news stories about him being anti-Semitic. Seeing the glowing reports of his life in the last 24 hours, I was surprised that I wasn’t seeing more about that part of his life.

    Unpleasant things are often left out of eulogies!

    I went back and did some research only to discovery the anti-Semetic stories originated with Drudge,

    I don’t know from Drudge but, in the throes of his illness, Nash did say some unpleasant things. One that you may have seen quoted by Drudge was also quoted by Sylvia Nasar in her book:

    [T]he root of all evil, as far as my personal life is concerned (life history) are Jews, in particular Jack Bricker who is Hitler

    At MIT, Bricker was a graduate student the young instructor Nash seduced into an affair.

    Apparently Nash did write some terrible things while in the grips of his disease, but most attributed them to the disease rather than the man.

    Except that he was also saying some unpleasant things about Jews and African-Americans and “race-mixing” in the ’40s, before the illness.

    Many others were saying those unpleasant things, too, of course.

  41. 41.

    Paul in KY

    May 26, 2015 at 9:09 am

    86 years old & you die in a car crash. Son ofa gun…

  42. 42.

    Paul in KY

    May 26, 2015 at 9:10 am

    @Villago Delenda Est: TANJ!

  43. 43.

    PurpleGirl

    May 27, 2015 at 3:43 pm

    @Cervantes: Thank you. I didn’t know much about Warren Weaver. I inferred the investor because of his participation in Interscience Press (founded by Courant, Weaver and Maurice Dekker). It was bought by John Wiley and became Wiley Interscience. Maurice Dekker was a chemist who was involved with science publishing in Europe. He and his family fled the Nazis also. (I worked for a few years as production editor at Marcel Dekker, Inc. Wiley forgot to get a non-compete agreement from the Dekkers.)

  44. 44.

    Bob Munck

    June 2, 2015 at 7:11 pm

    We had dinner with Tom Banchoff, also a fairly well-known mathematician, and his wife the night that Nash died. They were friends of the Nashes, but hadn’t heard about their accident. Right after we’d inadvertently told them, he got a text from Ken Ribet, also a mathematician and math-major classmate of my wife (and old boyfriend). Math is a small world.

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