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For many years, students and scholars in Princeton
have seen a ghostly, silent figure shuffling around the corridors of the math and physics building wearing purple sneakers
and occasionally writing numerology treatises on the blackboards. They called him the "Phantom of Fine Hall". The Phantom
is John Nash, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his generation, who had spiraled into schizophrenia in the 1950s.
Nash began to show signs of schizophrenia in 1958. He became paranoid and was admitted into the McLean Hospital, April–May 1959, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and mild depression with low self-esteem. After a problematic stay in Paris and Geneva, Nash returned to Princeton in 1960. He remained in and out of mental hospitals until
1970, being given insulin shock therapy and antipsychotic medications, usually as a result of being committed rather than by his
choice. After 1970, by his choice, he never took antipsychotic medication again. According to his biographer Nasar, he recovered
gradually with the passage of time. Encouraged by his wife, Alicia, Nash worked in a communitarian setting where his eccentricities
were accepted.
In campus legend, Nash became "The Phantom of Fine Hall" (Fine Hall is Princeton's mathematics
center), a shadowy figure who would scribble arcane equations on blackboards in the middle of the night.
In 1978, Nash was awarded the John von Neumann Theory Prize for his invention of non-cooperative equilibria, now called
Nash equilibria. He won the Leroy P. Steele Prize in 1999.
In 1994, he received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (along with two others), as a result of his game theory
work as a Princeton graduate student.
The game Hex, was invented by the Danish mathematician
Piet Hein, who introduced the game in 1942 at the Niels Bohr Institute,
and also independently invented by the mathematician John Nash in 1947 at Princeton University. It became known in Denmark
under the name Polygon (though Hein called it CON-TAC-TIX); Nash's fellow players at first called the game Nash.
Hex is a board game played on a hexagonal grid, theoretically of any size and several possible shapes,
but traditionally as a 11x11 rhombus.The game can never end in a tie, a fact found by John Nash: the only way to prevent your
opponent from forming a connecting path is to form a path yourself. In other words, Hex is a determined game.
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