Introduction: John Forbes Nash Jr. born June 13, 1928 is an American mathematician working in game theory and differential geometry. He shared the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics with two other game theorists, Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi. He is best known in popular culture as the subject of the Hollywood film, A Beautiful Mind, about his mathematical genius and his struggles with mental illness. Childhood/Adolescence: On June 13, 1928, John Forbes Nash was born in the small Appalachian town of Bluefield, West Virginia, the son of John Nash Sr., an electrical engineer, and Virginia Martin, a teacher. At 12 he was conducting scientific experiments in his room at home. John didn't like working with other people as a young man, preferring to do things alone. Instead of being sociable with his classmates, he instead mistook it for intellectual superiority, and believed that dances and sports were a distraction from experiments and studies. Martha, his sister, appears to have been a remarkably normal child while John seemed different from other children. When he was in high school he was reading ET's classic "Men Of Mathematics". At the time he was also doing electrical and chemical experiments. During his senior year of high school, John won a coveted Westinghouse Scholarship, one of only ten awarded in the nation. He attended the Carnegie Institute of Technology and, in 1948, graduated with a Master's degree after just three years. Although he initially planned to study chemical engineering, he quickly discovered a love for mathematics and changed his major. His advisor wrote him a recommendation saying, “This man is a genius.” He has participated twice in the William Lowell Putnam mathematics competition but, at... middle of paper... he has his own path and his own problems even if he continues to work in a public environment to help him manage his illness. Nash is still at Princeton, where he has a mathematics assignment. Although he is cautious around people he doesn't know, he is said to have a biting sense of humor. In 1978 John received the John Von Neumann Theory Prize for his invention of noncooperative equilibria, now called Nash equilibria. Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel as a result of his work on game theory as a graduate student at Princeton. Between 1945 and 1996, Nash published 23 scientific studies. Nash also created two popular games: Hex, in 1942 with Piet Hein; and So Long Sucker, in 1964 with M. Hausner and Lloyd S. Shapley. Both games demonstrate what Nash has been working on for years: the concept that in a game one must win and everyone else must lose.