Though his name and life story have received wide public recognition since the 2001 film "A Beautiful Mind," Nobel laureate in economics John Nash Jr. has not let Hollywood steer him from the field in which he was first recognized. Nash will give a lecture on "Ideal and Asymptotically Ideal Money" today at 4 p.m. in Salomon 101.
Nash shared the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994 with two other men for their "pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games," according to the Nobel Prize Web site.
Born in 1928, Nash is currently a senior research mathematician at Princeton University. He graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon University, in 1948 with both master's and bachelor's degrees in mathematics, and received a Ph.D. from Princeton. The Nash equilibrium, from his 1950 dissertation, defines a strategy for the mutual optimal outcome of a game involving multiple players.
In a recent interview, Nash said he could see himself working until the age of 100, if he lives that long. He includes among his research interests logic, game theory and cosmology and gravitation.
Taking some liberties, director Ron Howard fashioned Nash's story of brilliance and schizophrenia into the Academy Award-nominated film, "A Beautiful Mind." The film was based on Sylvia Nasar's biography of the same name.
His lecture today, part of the Wayland Collegium Faculty Interdisciplinary Seminar on Decision Making and Ration-ality, will examine the connection between rationality and irrationality and monetary theory and macroeconomics.
