Beautiful mind, valuable medal: John Nash's Nobel to be auctioned

James D. Watson’sfetched $4.76 millionin 2014, setting a record.William Faulkner’sfailed to sell in 2013, after bidding stalled out at $425,000, short of the minimum.

Now, the Nobel Prize medal belonging to the mathematicianJohn F. Nash, awarded in recognition of his fundamental contributions to game theory, is set to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York on Oct. 17. It carries an estimate of $2.5 to $4 million, which if reached will cement the apparent dominance — for now? — of scientists over literary types in the rarefied market for some of the world’s most difficult-to-acquire gold jewelry.

Mr. Nash, whose life inspired the movie “A Beautiful Mind,” won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1994, at a time when he was unemployed, after years of struggling with mental illness. The prize, he later said, “had a tremendous impact on my life, more than on the life of most prize winners.” (He died in a car accident last year, at age 86.)

Mr. Nash’s medal, which is being offered in its original red leather case, is only one of about a dozen Nobel medals known to have been sold at auction in the past few years, according to Sotheby’s, as part of aboomletsometimes attributed to $2.2 million price fetched in 2012 by the medal awarded to Francis Crick, who is among the discoverers with Mr. Watson of the double-helix structure of DNA. Scientists are not the only one to break $1 million: The 1936 Nobel Peace Prize medal awarded in 1936 toCarlos Saavedra Lamas, a former foreign minister of Argentina, sold for $1.1 million in 2014.

(THE NEW YORK TIMES)