U. hosts memorial service for Nash GS '50 and wife

The University mathematics department hosted a memorial serviceSaturdayfor John Nash GS '50, a long-time professor at the University and winner of the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, and his wife, Alicia Nash.

Nash and his wifediedin May in a taxi accident on the New Jersey Turnpike, at the respective ages of 86 and 82. Colleagues, friends and family of the Nashes were invited to share their remembrances.

University Vice President and Secretary Robert Durkee ’69, delivering a speech by University President Christopher Eisgruber ’83, said that even people who would not ordinarily take an interest in the life or death of a mathematician felt a personal connection to John and Alicia Nash, and people around the globe felt a personal loss when they died so suddenly.

“Through the magnificence of John’s achievements, their shared courage in the face of his illness and the many unexpected turns in their remarkable lives, John and Alicia embody for millions of people both the exhilaration of human aspiration and the sorrow of human tragedy,” Durkee said on Eisgruber's behalf.

Louis Nirenberg, professor of mathematics emeritus at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and, with Nash, co-winner of the 2015 Abel Prize, said that Nash was always looking for the next problem to solve and coming up with novel solutions.

“Whatever of his work that I read … I always had the feeling, gosh, I would never have thought of that,” Nirenberg said.

Professor Nash left an impact not only with his work as a mathematician, but also with his teaching, family friend of the Nashes James Manganaro said. Manganaro, who was one of Nash's calculus students in the academic year of 1957-58 at MIT, said that the most striking thing about Nash’s math class was his precise use of the English language.

“You had to go to Nash’s class with a pocketful of colored pens,” Manganaro said. “John would come to class and extract a box full of colored chalk from his jacket pocket. He would then present freshman math with crystal clarity and with a flickering of his Southern twang.”

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John David Stier, Nash’s son, said that the Princeton community was extremely important to his father.

“Here is the place where he was always accepted, never criticized and was allowed to be himself,” Stier said of his father’s experience at Princeton.

Stier added that the prizes Nash won during his academic career, including the Nobel Prize and the Abel Prize, would never have happened if not for the courage of Nash himself and the support of friends such as mathematics professors Joseph Kohn, Edward Nelson and Harold Kuhn.

“With friends like these, at this great university, it was impossible for my father to stay in the darkness forever,” Stier said.

Nash was born in 1928 in West Virginia, and earned a doctorate from the University in 1950 with his dissertation on non-cooperative games, which won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1994. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1959, and continued to battle it for several decades afterward. His life, discoveries and struggles with mental illness were chronicled in the biography “A Beautiful Mind” by Sylvia Nasar and in the film of the same name released in 2001.

“The worldwide legend of John and Alicia will endure as a unique story of struggle and redemption, and the personal memory of John and Alicia will live on in the hearts of this community among those who fortunate enough to know have known them as individuals, as colleagues, as friends,” Durkee said on Eisgruber's behalf.

The memorial service took place at 6:00 p.m.in the University Chapel.