Princeton University will celebrate the life and legacy of John Nash, the mathematician known worldwide from the biographical movie "A Beautiful Mind" that told of his intellectual triumphs and struggles with mental illness, at a service of remembrance and other events Saturday, Oct. 24.
The service for Nash, who with his wife, Alicia, died May 23 in an automobile accident, will be held at the University Chapel at 6 p.m. Speakers will include former colleagues, family, friends and a representative of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The service, open to the public, will cap a day of tribute on the Princeton campus.
In the morning and afternoon, a series of academic panels will be held to honor Nash, a 1994 Nobel Prize winner in economics renowned for his development of game theory as well as for his work in mathematics.
At 4:30 p.m., a public lecture by Sylvia Nasar, the author of "A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash," will be held in McDonnell Hall, Room A02. Her book was the basis for the "Beautiful Mind" movie, in which Russell Crowe portrayed Nash and Jennifer Connelly portrayed Mrs. Nash.
The Nashes were killed as they were returning to their Princeton Junction home from Oslo, Norway, where John had received the 2015 Abel Prize from the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. The academy honored him for his seminal work in partial differential equations, which are used to describe the basic laws of scientific phenomena.
Born in Bluefield, West Virginia, in 1928, Nash received his doctorate in mathematics from Princeton in 1950 and his graduate and bachelor's degrees from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1948.
Nash, who died at 86, had held the position of senior research mathematician at Princeton since 1995. Mrs. Nash was 82.
Arrangements to broadcast the Nasar lecture and memorial service over the Internet are pending.
