John Nash and his wife died in a car accident last week.
CNN: Nash, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994, was known for his work in game theory, and his personal struggle with paranoid schizophrenia. His life story inspired the 2001 Oscar-winning film “A Beautiful Mind” starring Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly as the Nashes.Nash’s 27 page dissertation would eventually win him a Nobel prize in economics. Nash’s dissertation extended von Neumann and Morgenstern’s theory of games from cooperative, bargaining-type solutions to non-cooperative solutions in which each player is assumed to act in their self-interest and in so doing made the theory tremendously more relevant to economics, business, political science, and even theories of animal behavior and evolution.
Here is further background on Nash’s work in game theory. Here is the PBS documentary A Beautiful Madness with lots of links to interviews and further explanations of his work and influence.