SAT写作素材之约翰·纳什John Nash

2014年05月16日17:20 来源：小站整理: 参与（0）阅读（4954）

摘要：SAT是由美国大学委员会委托美国教育测验服务社定期举办的测验，做为美国各大学申请入学的重要参考条件之一。SAT的写作部分是根据，但不是照搬旧版SAT II中的写作改变而来（后者由旧版TSWE）得出，包括选择题和短文。小站教育为同学们带来了写作素材。

SAT近年来被越来越多的人所了解、关注。主要是由于近年来留学低龄化的日益突出，有越来越多的同学想尽早尽快奔赴大洋彼岸留学。虽然SAT整体上来看可能难度上不如中国高考，但是如果备考SAT的同学掉以轻心，即使学习不错、英文很好，也依然很有可能造成成绩悲剧。官方真题Official为备考SAT的同学们找到了英文SAT作文素材，希望对同学们有所帮助。

John Nash (1928- )

When the young Nash had applied to graduate school at Princeton in 1948, his old Carnegie Tech professor, R.J. Duffin, wrote only one line on his letter of recommendation: "This man is a genius".

It was at Princeton that Nash encountered the theory of games, then recently launched by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. However, they had only managed to solve non-cooperative games in the case of "pure rivalries" (i.e. zero-sum). The young Nash turned to rivalries with mutual gain. His trick was the use of best-response functions and a recent theorem that had just emerged - Kakutani's fixed point-theorem.

His main result, the "Nash Equilibrium", was published in 1950 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He followed this up with a paper which introduced yet another solution concept - this time for two-person cooperative games - the "Nash Bargaining Solution" (NBS) in 1950. A 1951 paper attached his name to yet another side of economics - this time, the "Nash Programme", reflecting his methodological call for the reduction of all cooperative games into a non-cooperative framework.

His contributions to mathematics were no less remarkable. As an undergraduate, he had inadvertently (and independently) proved Brouwer's fixed point theorem. Later on, he went on to break one of Riemann's most perplexing mathematical conundrums. From then on, Nash provided breakthrough after breakthrough in mathematics.

In 1958, on the threshold of his career, Nash got struck by paranoid schizophrenia. He lost his job at MIT in 1959 (he had been tenured there in 1958 - at the age of 29) and was virtually incapicated by the disease for the next two decades or so. He roamed about Europe and America, finally, returning to Princeton where he became a sad, ghostly character on the campus - "the Phantom of Fine Hall" as Rebecca Goldstein described him in her novel, Mind-Body Problem.

The disease began to evaporate in the early 1970s and Nash began to gradually to return to his work in mathematics. However, Nash himself associated his madness with his living on an "ultralogical" plane, "breathing air too rare" for most mortals, and if being "cured" meant he could no longer do any original work at that level, then, Nash argued, a remission might not be worthwhile in the end. As John Dryden once put it:

Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide.

今后，小站教育也会对此份珍贵的资料进行编译，以方便更多备考SAT的同学使用。请同学们多多关注小站教育SAT信息!