The Genius Who Vanished

John Nash laid out his equilibrium idea in a PhD thesis just 26 pages long. The recommendation letter that got him into Princeton's graduate program, written by his Carnegie Tech professor Richard Duffin, contained the now-famous line: "He is a mathematical genius." At Princeton, Nash proved that every finite game has at least one equilibrium — the result that won him the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994.

The prize almost never came. Diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1959, Nash spent years in and out of hospitals and drifted around the Princeton campus, his work apparently behind him. His slow recovery decades later was as unexpected as the breakthrough itself.