John Nash Pulled A Win-Win Focus On Vision: Mathematician beat mental illness, garnered a Nobel Prize.(LEADERS & SUCCESS)

Byline: SARAH Z. SLEEPER

As a 20-something doctoral student at Princeton University in the 1940s, John Forbes Nash Jr. usually did not win at chess.

In a favorite Ivy League version of the game, two players sat back to back so they couldn't see each other's moves. An umpire tracked the game on a chessboard unseen by the rivals.

"Nash was outclassed at the game by colleagues," wrote John Hoey, editor of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, in "The Peculiar Genius of John Nash." However frustrating for the brilliant, eccentric young mathematician, those lost games would give little indication of what was to come for Nash.

None of the winning chess players went on to win a Nobel Prize, notes Hoey, but Nash did. He received the prize in 1994, some 45 years after first publishing game theories that would become central to the study of economics.

Nash's dissertation at Princeton, "Non-Cooperative Games," offered a way to solve games so that rivals had mutual gains. It was a departure from the earlier, important work of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, in which the solutions were zero-sum -- somebody wins and somebody loses.

Nash's idea, wrote John Milner, director of the Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the State University of New York, "was nothing short of revolutionary." That's because it transcends theory and is useful in the real world.