刚才收到《纽约时报》Breaking News: John Nash, Nobel-Winning Mathematician Portrayed in ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ Dies in Crash。纳什夫妇是因出租车失控遭遇车祸的。（Nash当年患病时，相信纽约时报刊发有外星人的消息，而他能看懂。） 

 正如标题说的，纳什可能更多是因为电影而闻名的，whose decades-long descent into severe mental illness and eventual recovery were the subject of a 2001 film, “A Beautiful Mind”。华盛顿邮报也说，it became known to most people by its Hollywood description. His mind was beautiful.

纳什的27页博士论文（Non-Cooperative Games, 普林斯顿大学, 1950；部分发表在Annals of Mathematics 54(2),1951.）奠定了他的均衡理论的基础。他是天才，可惜病了；也许有病，所以天才。他的直觉很好，能在证明之前看见光亮，所以他的思想是“顿悟”（revelations）而不是“发现”（findings）。他说，“I felt like I might get a divine revelation by seeing a certain number; a great coincidence could be interpreted as a message from heaven.”早在1958年，Fortune杂志就把他列入当代最伟大数学家的队伍。

为他立传的Sylvia Nasar引Nash同事的话说，别人都是找一条路上山，而纳什会爬上另一座山，让遥远的山峰照亮前一座山峰。（Everyone else would climb a peak by looking for a path somewhere on the mountain. Nash would climb another mountain altogether and from a distant peak would shine a searchlight back on the first peak.）

Nash博士论文打印稿，他用Brouwer不动点定理证明每个有限博弈都存在一个均衡点

 

 

 

 

相关专题：纳什的美丽人生
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