Von Neumann is a Hungarian American mathematician and polymath (an individual with a broad knowledge base who studies a variety of subjects) and one of Princeton’s most famous professors during John Nash’s PhD studies at the university. Nasar describes him as “possibly the last true polymath,” a “worldly and engaged” scholar who forged connections between his academic work and the political sphere: for example, he was a member of the Atomic Energy Commission and the top member of the Manhattan Project, advising the United States on the atomic bomb and military strategy during the Cold War. Though in A Beautiful Mind, von Neumann is initially disparaging of Nash’s research, Nash would build on von Neumann’s foundational work in game theory, describing a scenario—a solution for a non-cooperative game—that von Neumann failed to sketch out in his and Oskar Morgenstern’s 1944 treatise on game theory, The Theory of Games and Economic Work.