American mathematician and theorist John Nash was BOTD in 1928. Born in Bluefield, West Virginia, he studied engineering and economics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and Princeton University. In 1951, he became an academic at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pursuing research into partial differential equations. He is best known for his work on the mathematical principles of game theory. His theory that all players in a finite game can arrive at an optimal outcome when considering the possible actions of other players became known as “the Nash equilibrium”. Nash was attracted to men throughout his life, developing obsessive crushes on fellow students and colleagues from his late teens, and was arrested in 1954 for indecent exposure in a public bathroom. His career was also affected by his struggles with paranoid schizophrenia, requiring regular hospitalisation. Nash had a brief relationship with one of his hospital nurses, Eleanor Stier, leaving her when she announced her pregnancy. In 1957, he married physics student Alicia Lardé Lopez-Harrison in 1957, having a son together. After years of caring for Nash through his various illness, Alicia divorced him in 1963, returning to live with and care for him in 1968. Later in life, Nash had “special friendships” with two men, apparently with Alicia’s knowledge. After decades of relative obscurity, he was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics for his work on game theory. He became more widely known following the release of the 2001 biopic A Beautiful Mind, starring Russell Crowe as a robustly heterosexual Nash and Jennifer Connolly as the devoted Alicia. A critical and commercial success, it won the Oscar for best picture, though was criticised for excising references to Nash’s bisexuality, abandonment of his son with Stier and reputedly anti-Semitic comments he made during the 1960s. Nash participated in a number of interviews for the promotion of the film, denying that he was homosexual or an anti-Semite. He and Alicia remarried in 2011, remaining together until their deaths in a car accident in 2015. He was 86.