Who was John Forbes Nash Jr
” you ask. Born 1928, the son of an electrical engineer and a school teacher, John Nash grew up around Blue Field, West Virginia, in the 1930’s. Young Nash was a stocky, shy boy, for whom his younger sister Martha reluctantly had to act as a social operative. Loved by his parents, living in a quiet rural setting, he nevertheless suffered from anxiety, did not fit in at school. But when he was 12, John read one of those little books common then, popularizations of figures in literature and science: E. T. Bell’s Men of Mathematics. Nash independently proved one of the theorems of Pierre de Fermat, a 17th Century French mathematician, whom he read about in the book. The satisfaction which that accomplishment gave Nash was to propel him for a lifetime, re-inventing mathematical theories, and then creating his own. The imaginative Nash applied his interest to Chemistry when he entered Bluefield College at the age of 13, but perhaps because his experiments in explosives led to the death of a
