Memorial Service for Mathematician John Nash to Be Held Oct. 24

A recent photo of John and Alicia Nash from Zach Smith and Maria Ivarsson of the Color Crew.
Photo of John and Alicia Nash from Zach Smith and Maria Ivarsson of the Color Crew.

A memorial service for mathematician John Nash, whose intellectual triumphs and struggle with mental illness were chronicled in the book and movie “A Beautiful Mind,” will be held at 6 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 24, at the Princeton University Chapel.

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 Crow portrayed Nash and Jennifer Connelly portrayed Mrs. Nash.

Nash and his wife, Alicia, died May 23 in an car accident on the New Jersey Turnpike. The Nashes were killed as they were returning to their Princeton Junction home from Oslo, Norway, where John Nash 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 University in 1950. Nash, who died at 86, held the position of senior research mathematician at Princeton since 1995. Alicia Nash was 82.