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John Nash's Dissertation

Non-cooperative Games, May 1950, is available in PDF format  Non-Cooperative_Games_Nash.pdf . The dissertation is provided for research use only. 

[Note: Chapter 6 of  The Essential John Nash,  edited by Harold W. Kuhn and Sylvia Nasar (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001) contains a facsimile of Nash's 1950 Ph.D. dissertation on non-cooperative games.]

In the movie  A Beautiful Mind  there is a scene in which faculty members present their pens to Nash. What is the origin of the pen ceremony? When did it start?

The scene in the movie,  A Beautiful Mind,  in which mathematics professors ritualistically present pens to Nash was completely fabricated in Hollywood. No such custom exists. What it symbolizes is that Nash was accepted and recognized in the mathematics community for his accomplishments. While some movies are based on books, the film A Beautiful Mind states that it was  inspired  by the life of John Nash. There are many discrepancies between the book and the film.

May I see Nash’s graduate school records?

John F. Nash, Jr's records have been digitzed and are available to view here:  Graduate Alumni Records

May I see Nash’s faculty file personnel records?

Personnel files transferred to the archives after 2003 : Files are closed until 100 years after the person's year of birth or 5 years after the person's year of death, whichever is longer. Therefore, John F. Nash's personell files are closed until, June 13, 2028.

May I have a copy of Nash’s 1994 Nobel Prize acceptance speech?

At the Nobel Prize Award ceremony, His Majesty the King of Sweden hands each Laureate a diploma, a medal, and a document confirming the Prize amount. The Laureates do not give acceptance speeches . The scene in the movie A Beautiful Mind in which Nash thanks his wife Alicia for her continued support during his illness is fictional.

Laureates are each invited to give an hour-long lecture; however, the Nobel committee did not ask Nash to do so, due to concerns over his mental health.

Additional Resources

Princetoniana Committee Oral History Project Records , Interview with Harold Kuhn, Part 1, pp. 31-40.  In this part of the interview, Prof. Kuhn discusses his behind the scenes work for John Nash’s Nobel Prize.

Historical Subject Files Collection, 1746-2005 : A Beautiful Mind.

Article:  John Nash automobile accident May 23, 2015, in Monroe Township, New Jersey.

John F Nash PhD

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In this page you can find Nash’s PhD thesis:

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*: Thanks to Rebeca Duarte Miguel for this, and to Jeek Midford for spotting some spelling mistakes.

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History of Economic Ideas pp 117–130 Cite as

John Nash (1928–2015)

• Panayotis G. Michaelides 3 &
• Theodoulos Eleftherios Papadakis 3  
• First Online: 29 January 2023

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Nash ( 1995 ).

Nash ( 1996 ).

Leonard ( 1994 ).

Fragnelli and Gambarelli ( 2015 ).

Nasar ( 1998 ).

Rubinstein ( 1995 ).

Our discussion follows Myerson ( 1999 ).

Cournot ( 1838 ).

Myerson ( 1999 ).

Borel ( 1921 ).

von Neumann ( 1928 ).

Myerson ( 1999 )

von Neumann and Morgenstern ( 1944 ).

Screpanti and Zamagni ( 2005 ).

Nash ( 1950b ).

Nash ( 1950a ).

Nash ( 1951 ).

Mornati ( 2018 ).

Varoufakis ( 2007 ).

Milnor ( 1995 ).

Economist ( 2016 ).

Colman et al. ( 2018 ).

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Kreps and Wilson ( 1982 ).

Harsanyi ( 1967 –1968).

Aumann ( 1974 ).

Fellman ( 2007 )

Daskalakis et al. ( 2009 ).

Babichenko and Rubinstein ( 2020 ).

Daskalakis et al. ( 2009 , p. 196).

See also Karlin and Perez ( 2017 , p. 84).

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Panayotis G. Michaelides & Theodoulos Eleftherios Papadakis

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Michaelides, P.G., Papadakis, T.E. (2023). John Nash (1928–2015). In: History of Economic Ideas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19697-3_10

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Read John Nash’s Super Short PhD Thesis with 26 Pages & 2 Citations: The Beauty of Inventing a Field

in Math | June 1st, 2015 1 Comment

Last week  John Nash , the Nobel Prize-win­ning math­e­mati­cian, and sub­ject of the block­buster film A Beau­ti­ful Mind , passed away at the age of 86. He died in a taxi cab acci­dent in New Jer­sey.

Days lat­er, Cliff Pick­over high­light­ed a curi­ous fac­toid: When Nash wrote his Ph.D. the­sis in 1950, “Non Coop­er­a­tive Games” at Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty, the dis­ser­ta­tion (you can read it online  here) was brief. It ran only 26 pages. And more par­tic­u­lar­ly, it was light on cita­tions. Nash’s diss cit­ed two texts: One was writ­ten by John von Neu­mann & Oskar Mor­gen­stern, whose book,  The­o­ry of Games and Eco­nom­ic Behav­ior   (1944), essen­tial­ly cre­at­ed game the­o­ry and rev­o­lu­tion­ized the field of eco­nom­ics; the oth­er cit­ed text, “Equi­lib­ri­um Points in n‑Person Games,”  was an arti­cle writ­ten by Nash him­self. And it laid the foun­da­tion for his dis­ser­ta­tion, anoth­er sem­i­nal work in the devel­op­ment of game the­o­ry, for which Nash won the Nobel Prize in Eco­nom­ic Sci­ences in 1994 .

The reward of invent­ing a new field, I guess, is hav­ing a slim bib­li­og­ra­phy.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Brilliant Madness — 2002 Film on the Nobel Prize Winning Mathematician" href="http://www.openculture.com/2012/06/john_nash_ia_brilliant_madnessi.html" rel="bookmark">John Nash: A Bril­liant Mad­ness — 2002 Film on the Nobel Prize Win­ning Math­e­mati­cian

The Short­est-Known Paper Pub­lished in a Seri­ous Math Jour­nal: Two Suc­cinct Sen­tences

The World Record for the Short­est Math Arti­cle: 2 Words

Free Online Math Cours­es

by OC | Permalink | Comments (1) |

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Comments (1), 1 comment so far.

This was shock­ing to know about the demise of John Nash. I had a chance to view the film “a beau­ti­ful mind” with a close friend, Steve Land­fried in Wis­con­sin-Chica­go where John Nash was a sub­ject of this film. I am glad that Steve made this choice for me since I could see and feel all, that this mag­ni­fi­cient sci­en­tist had gone through.This is still my favorite film because of its sub­ject

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