This past week, on May 23, 2015, the much loved and respected John F. Nash Jr., along with his wife, Alicia Nash, passed away in a tragic car accident while returning home from his receipt of the 2015 Abel Prize for his work in partial differential equations. The Nobel winner and his wife were the subject of the 2001 Academy Award winning film A Beautiful Mind. Nash's most famous contribution to mathematics and economics was in the field of game theory, which has enabled others to build on that work and was the focus of the film. Nash's long career as a mathematician was marked by both brilliant achievements and terrible struggles with mental illness. Despite his battle with schizophrenia, Nash inspired generations of mathematicians and garnered a stunning array of awards, including the 1994 Nobel Prize in economic sciences, the American Mathematical Society's 1999 Leroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research, and the 1978 John von Neumann Theory Prize. We were personally honored in 2003 when Nash presented his work with Mathematica at the International Mathematica Symposium in London.

In many areas of mathematics, 1 is the answer. Squaring a number above or below 1 results in a new number that is larger or smaller. Sometimes, determining whether something is "big" is based on whether a largest dimension is greater than 1. For instance, with sides of length 13,800 km, Saturn's hexagon would be considered big. A "little polygon" is defined as a polygon where 1 is the maximum distance between vertices. In 1975, Ron Graham found the biggest little hexagon, which has more area than the regular hexagon, as shown below. The red diagonals have length 1. All other diagonals (not drawn) are smaller than 1.