Most academics spend their lifetime craving to leave one lasting contribution to their field. By the age of 30, John Nash, who died at 86 in a weekend road accident along with his wife Alicia, had made discoveries that would revolutionise two disciplines and secure him both the Nobel Prize in economics and its equivalent for mathematics, the Abel Prize.
His doctoral thesis at Princeton, a slender 32-page document completed when he was just 21, placed game theory, the study of strategic interactions pioneered by mathematician John von Neumann, at the heart of economics.
After Nash, economists stopped thinking exclusively about unrealistic models of perfectly competitive markets and began focusing on cases in which each agent has to consider the actions of rivals.