One of the highlight of last year’s Stony Brook conference was John Milnor’s talk about John Nash. The video is now available online. John Milnor, also an Abel Prize laureate, is familiar to many economists from his book “Topology from the differential approach”. He has known John Nash from the beginning of their careers in the common room in the math school at Princeton University. Watch him talk with clarity and humor about young Nash’s ambitions, creativity, courage, and contributions.
Here is a the handwritten letter which Nash wrote to the NSA in 1955 (pdf), fifteen years before Cook formalized the P/NP problem. In the letter Nash conjectures that for most encryption mechanisms, recovering the key from the cipher requires exponential amount of time. And here is what Nash had to say about proving this conjecture:
The Leisure of the Theory Class 
2 comments
March 2, 2016 at 9:23 am
Carlo
Interesting find.
It’s a little funny that you chose to emphasise Milnor’s having won the Abel Prize, when his having won the Fields Medal seems to me much more significant. (Though admittedly this is coming from someone who isn’t a mathematician, so I could very well be wrong on this.)
I know that Nash won the Abel Prize too, but you know.
March 2, 2016 at 12:20 pm
Eran
Yup, forgot or didn’t know about the Fields. Of course the reason I mention Abel Prize is that Nash got it.