Key words: economist illness Nobel price winner

　　John Nash(1928-)

　　When the young Nash had applied to graduate school at Princeton in 1948, his old Carnegie Tech professor, R.J. Duffin, wrote only one line on his letter of recommendation: "This man is a genius".

　　It was at Princeton that Nash encountered the theory of games, then recently launched by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. However, they had only managed to solve non-cooperative games in the case of "pure rivalries" (i.e. zero-sum). The young Nash turned to rivalries with mutual gain. His trick was the use of best-response functions and a recent theorem that had just emerged - Kakutani's fixed point-theorem.

　　His main result, the "Nash Equilibrium", was published in 1950 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He followed this up with a paper which introduced yet another solution concept - this time for two-person cooperative games - the "Nash Bargaining Solution" (NBS) in 1950. A 1951 paper attached his name to yet another side of economics - this time, the "Nash Programme", reflecting his methodological call for the reduction of all cooperative games into a non-cooperative framework.

　　His contributions to mathematics were no less remarkable. As an undergraduate, he had inadvertently (and independently) proved Brouwer's fixed point theorem. Later on, he went on to break one of Riemann's most perplexing mathematical conundrums. From then on, Nash provided breakthrough after breakthrough in mathematics.

　　In 1958, on the threshold of his career, Nash got struck by paranoid schizophrenia. He lost his job at M.I.T. in 1959 (he had been tenured there in 1958 - at the age of 29) and was virtually incapicated by the disease for the next two decades or so. He roamed about Europe and America, finally, returning to Princeton where he became a sad, ghostly character on the campus - "the Phantom of Fine Hall" as Rebecca Goldstein described him in her novel, Mind-Body Problem.

　　The disease began to evaporate in the early 1970s and Nash began to gradually to return to his work in mathematics. However, Nash himself associated his madness with his living on an "ultralogical" plane, "breathing air too rare" for most mortals, and if being "cured" meant he could no longer do any original work at that level, then, Nash argued, a remission might not be worthwhile in the end. As John Dryden once put it:

　　Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

　　約翰·納什(1928-)

　　約翰·納什生于1928 年6 月13 日。父親是電子工程師與教師，第一次世界大戰的老兵。納什小時孤獨內向，雖然父母對他照顧有加，但老師認為他不合群不善社交。 納什的數學天分大約在14 歲開始展現。他在普林斯頓大學讀博士時剛剛二十出頭，但他的一篇關于非合作博弈的博士論文和其他相關文章，確立了他博弈論大師的地位。在20 世紀50 年代末，他已是聞名世界的科學家了。

　　然而，正當他的事業如日中天的時候，30 歲的納什得了嚴重的精神分裂癥。他的妻子艾利西亞———麻省理工學院物理系畢業生，表現出鋼鐵一般的意志：她挺過了丈夫被禁閉治療、孤立無援的日子，走過了惟一兒子同樣罹患精神分裂癥的震驚與哀傷……漫長的半個世紀之后，她的耐心和毅力終于創下了了不起的奇跡：和她的兒子一樣，納什教授漸漸康復，并在1994 年獲得諾貝爾獎經濟學獎。

　　如今，納什已經基本恢復正常，并重新開始科學研究。他現在是普林斯頓大學數學教授，但已經不再任教。學校經濟學系經常會舉辦有關博弈論的論壇，納什有時候會參加，但是他幾乎從不發言，每次都是靜靜地來，靜靜地走。