On March 25th of this year the Norwegian Academy of Sciences announced that John Nash along with Louis Nirenberg were awarded the Abel prize in Mathematics. The prize is named in honor of Niels Hendrik Abel, whose name graces commutative groups (with a pun involving grapes) and certain integrals and functions in the complex plane related to elliptic curves. Nash is being honored for what is now called the Nash embedding theorem which states that every Riemannian manifold can be isometrically embedded into some Euclidean space. The official citation states Nash’s “striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis” in its press release. In 2012, Harold Kuhn conducted an interview of Nash on his discoveries and his early years at Princeton.
Nash is the first Nobel laureate to have won the Abel prize but not the first prize winner to have made contributions to Game Theory. In 2011, the Abel prize was awarded to John Milnor.
