美丽的心灵陨落了

2024-07-02 12浏览

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*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