John Forbes Nash Jr. and Alicia Nash: A Tribute
A Beautiful Mind is gone. The world will not be the same.
On May 23, 2015, John Forbes Nash Jr and his wife Alicia were killed in a car accident.
If you are looking for grisly details of their passing you won’t find them here. I don’t scrutinize death, I only celebrate the life that is no longer with us. Or in this case lives. I know that he wasn’t a writer in the traditional sense, and the biography that was written about his life was unauthorized but where we converse in letters and words, John Nash Jr. used lines, letters and numbers to explain things all around us.John Nash Jr’s theories are used in economics, evolutionary biology, accounting, military theory, computing, artificial intelligence and politics.
John had a troubled past, one that was glossed over slightly in the movie A Beautiful Mind.
It was publicly known that he was struggling with schizophrenia for a large portion of his life.
A few of the symptoms of schizophrenia are abnormal social behavior (which actually plagues many different disorders not just schizophrenia) and failure to recognize what is real or fiction.
Although he had such a debilitating disease he was still able to achieve some monumental breakthroughs in Economics and Mathematics.
In 1994 John received the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economics, 2010 the Double Helix Medal for positively impacted human health by raising awareness and funds for biomedical research and 2015 the Abel Prize for his work on nonlinear partial differential equations.
He is also said to be the creator of the board game Hex, while he was at Princeton. The game skill requires the players to connect one side of the board to the opposite side. Before a game board was even devised, the boys at Princeton would play it on the mosaic tiles on the bathroom floor.
Along with John, his beloved wife Alicia’s light was extinguished.
Alicia Lopez-Harrison de Lardé, John’s Wife, was not just a pretty face or a tag along wife.
She graduated from MIT majoring in Physics. She was brilliant and smart in her own right. She should be valued for her own work and efforts as a person in a male dominated world.
As a role model, she was inspiring, having graduated in a male dominated field. Through numerous searches, I can’t find much about her life that was just hers. Any mention of her name anywhere it is normally in an article written about John. or a woman who helped get John through multiple hard times in his life
I think Alicia Nash needs her own Wikipedia page.
Both John and Alicia were strong advocates of patients rights and mental health advocates. My condolences to their families for these lights lost from their lives.
There are too many who have left us this year.
