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A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash (Paperback) (平装)
by Sylvia Nasar
| Category:
Biography, Story |
| Market price: ¥ 178.00
MSL price:
¥ 158.00
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MSL rating:
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| MSL Pointer Review:
A journey through one man's life from the heights of his brilliance to the depths of his isolation in a world of delusion and loneliness. |
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AllReviews |
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The New York Times (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-29 00:00>
A Beautiful Mind tells a moving story and offers a remarkable look into the arcane world of mathematics and the tragedy of madness. |
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Wall Street Journal (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-29 00:00>
After suffering with Mr. Nash's family through his madness, the reader greets his recovery-and his ability to reforge a bond with his wife-as a triumph.... A Beautiful Mind is one of the few scientific biographies I have encountered that could plausibly be described as a three-handkerchief read. |
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Kevin Corn (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-29 00:00>
First off, I have to admit I loved the movie and credit it with getting me to read this book. After reading this book, however, I realized that the movie (as absorbing as it was) left out so many important details about John Nash's early and later years, details which make all the difference in understanding the richness and complexity of his life....his childhood as an eccentric, if gifted, child, his connection to two different women (and the two children he had) and the oddness of those relationships.
The author also reveals that one of Nash's children suffers from acute schizophrenia and writes about the similarities and differences between his illness and that of his father. If you want to go beyond just the brief intro to Nash's life that the movie portrayed, be sure to get a copy of this one.
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A reader (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-29 00:00>
As a scientist and researcher myself, I know full well the trap that one can fall into when one assumes that, given sufficient time and space, one can solve any problem if the full power of one's mind and the complete concentration of one's waking thoughts are brought to bear in the solution of that problem. It is easy once a discovery is made to decide that further inspirations are bound to occur if only the mind is allowed to do nothing but search for new problems. I think that Nash had a tendency to feel that any problem he could think of would have a solution which could be derived given one's absolute attention.
Nash seems to suffer from a melancholy developing around the problems which are yet unsolved; a regret that overwhelms the joy which successsful solutions should have brought to the one who discovers those solutions. This coupled with depression and mental illness are terrible burdens which only the strongest of wills could cope with. I admire Nash's resolve, and am glad that his story is out there to inspire others. As a head trauma survivor, I know what a long journey it is after a brain breaks to go from sick to healthy, and how important it is not to give up without a fight. Another person who fought the brave fight against severe mental illness and won is Tracy Harris, and her book, "The Music of Madness" gives us a fascinating peek into the mind of a musical genius fractured by mental illness and the story of the restoration of her Self and Mind. The life-paths of both Nash and Harris make for unique and inspirational reads which one cannot put down easily until one has made it to the end of the book.
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A reader (MSL quote), Canada
<2007-01-29 00:00>
John Forbes Nash, Jr. was a genius who suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and was in and out of mental institutions for most of his life. Nasar's book, as she states so succinctly in her prologue, is Nash's story, "in three acts: genius, madness, reawakening."
Naturally introverted, even at a young age, Nash was described as being "bookish and slightly odd." His mother had him reading by the time he was four and instead of coloring books, his father gave him science books to read. But despite his parents' efforts, the young Nash was prone to daydreaming in school, which led his teachers to describe him as an underachiever. A loner and the ultimate nerd, his best friends were books, his bedroom resembled a science lab, he was always the last to be chosen for baseball, and at a school dance, he danced with chairs rather than girls.
Although his elementary school math teachers complained he couldn't do the work, his mother noticed he wasn't following the teachers' instructions because he had devised a simpler way of solving the problems. By high school, he was deciphering problems his chemistry teacher wrote on the blackboard, without using pencil or paper. In college, his math professors would call on Nash when they themselves ran into problems solving complex equations they were presenting to their classes.
But together with his brilliance were eccentricities that became more evident as Nash aged. Those close to him characterized him as "disconnected" and "deeply unknowable."
He had little use for textbooks and was known for solving difficult (and often previously unsolvable) problems using "no references but his own mind." His peers called the results he was able to obtain "beautiful" and "striking", perhaps his greatest achievement being his work on game theory, which led to a Nobel Prize for economics in 1994. He possessed a true love of discovery - while swimming with a friend in California, the two were dragged out to sea by an undercurrent and nearly drowned. Finally reaching shore exhausted, the friend was grateful for surviving while Nash, after briefly catching his breath, re-entered the surf exclaiming, "I wonder if that was an accident. I think I'll go back in and see."
Nash was in California during the Cold War working for the internationally famous think tank known as the RAND Corporation. Funded by the U.S. Air Force, RAND was populated by "the best minds in mathematics, physics, political science, and economics." Their principle focus was developing strategies to deter - or if that failed, to win - a nuclear war against Russia. Suddenly, the game theory Nash had been intrigued by at Princeton had a practical application, for war is the ultimate game of conflict. Years later, a more profitable application would be the FCC's $7-billion sale of cell phone air space to competing communications conglomerates.
Possibly the oddest in an odd bunch of ducks, Nash's math colleagues over the years included a professor who used a mathematical formula to select his suits; the manic-depressive Norbert Wiener (the founder of cybernetics), who was known to say such things as "When we met, was I walking to the faculty club or away from it? For in the latter case I've already had my lunch"; and others who were "beset by shyness, awkwardness, strange mannerisms, and all kinds of physical and psychological tics.'"
By the age of 30 it became apparent Nash was more than just eccentric as he started to display symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia; behaving suspiciously, becoming suspect of others, and finally announcing that "abstract powers from outer space" were communicating with him through encrypted messages printed in the New York Times and broadcast by radio stations. He developed "an obsession with the stock and bond markets," investing his mother's savings, convinced he could outsmart the markets and earn a profit. Instead, the results were "disastrous, to say the least." He was offered a prestigious chair in the mathematics department at the University of Chicago - something he had long strived for - but in response the chairman of the department received a strange letter from Nash declining the offer since he had decided to become the "Emperor of Antarctica" instead.
Eventually, his illness required long periods of hospitalization while he endured drug and insulin shock therapy, with the result being the loss of a considerable portion of his memory. When an associate came to visit during one of his hospital stays, Nash mused, "What if they don't let me out until I'm NORMAL?" Although Nash shared some exquisite company, at one point being hospitalized with the poet Robert Lowell, on the whole he was slightly atypical of the average mental patient. Most don't work on a paper on fluid dynamics while institutionalized, and he took some ribbing for this. Nasar notes an instance when another patient remarked, "Professor, let me show you how one uses a broom."
Despite his illness, the math community rallied around Nash. A colleague remembers, "Everybody wanted to help [him]. His was a mind too good to waste."
By 1990, his illness had gone into remission and he was able to stop taking antipsychotic drugs, while learning to separate rational thinking from delusional thinking. In spite of his amazing recovery, awarding him with the Nobel Prize was a contentious issue due to his history of schizophrenia. But once awarded, there was resolve that the right decision had been made about a very worthy individual. One committee member recalls, "We resurrected him in a way. It was emotionally satisfying." Soon after it was announced he had won, Nash half-joked "he hoped that getting the Nobel would improve his credit rating because he really wanted a credit card."
Nasar's engaging account of Nash's life and work is both comprehensive and well-written. It is highly recommended reading if you're looking for the full story.
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Andrew Olmsted (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-29 00:00>
If there's a more terrifying affliction than mental illness, an inability to control the one thing that truly belongs to you, your thoughts, I can't imagine what it would be. Sylvia Nasar's carefully researched and very well-written book takes the reader along on such a horrible journey, following the slow descent of mathemetician John Nash into a devastating paranoid schizophrenia that, in many ways, robbed Nash of close to a quarter-century of his life.
Nasar begins with Nash's childhood and follows him through college and graduate school, introducing us to a man at once awe-inspiring and yet in many ways wholly unadmirable. Nash was an arrogant, unpleasant, in some ways reprehensible human being who frequently treated other people as little more than tools for his use or objects for his entertainment. Yet he was also an incredible genius whose ability to solve incredibly complex mathematical problems and his breakthrough that would lead to his Nobel prize marked him as an intellect that might well have rivaled Einstein and Von Neumann.
Then Nasar forces us to follow this fascinating man into the terrifying world his illness created for him, where aliens sent him coded messages and where Nash became convinced he was a religious leader sent to save mankind. Watching his descent, it's impossible not to shudder at the realization this could well happen to anyone.
But, through what Nash now argues is his ability to choose not to listen to his paranoid ideations, Nash overcame his schizophrenia and managed to rejoin the mathematical community. Nasar follows Nash back to respectability, and provides a fascinating look behind the scenes of Nobel politics as she examines the circumstances surrounding his prize.
In all, Nasar has created an excellent work that is well-researched, easy to read, and worthy of any reader's time.
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Andi Miller (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-29 00:00>
Initially, I was intimidated by the amount of mathematical theory and high-level concepts that this book presented alongside the life of John Nash, but how can a biography do a mathematical genius justice without it? For those who persevered through the heavily math-laden sections of the text, I think Nasar did a great job making it as accessible as possible for the average reader, like myself.
The story of John Forbes Nash, Jr. is, without a doubt, an intriguing one. As I read along and discovered the difficulties and hurdles associated with schizophrenia I steadily began to wonder what it must feel like, first, to be a genius, second, to be a genius increasingly out of touch with what he loves most. Nash's life was one of isolation, first due to his incredible ability to think, and then because of his outrageous ideas and delusions. His odd little ways, along with his progressively more noticeable mental illness, took away many of the chances at greatness that Nash had always felt were just on the horizon.
The devotion of his wife, Alicia, was Dr. Nash's saving grace at times. Even though she had to separate from him to get a bit of perspective on life and just take a break, she never turned her back on him. Alicia was always willing to help his life and career whenever possible.
It's quite astounding that Nash was able to endure so many years of hellish mental turmoil and come out on the other side to receive one of the greatest of all honors...the Nobel Prize. Throughout the book, I constantly found myself pulling for Nash and longing to give his naysayers a good slap. His mind and his genius are truly beautiful, and I believe Dr. Nash is one of America's greatest treasures. I feel enriched by this story and reminded that all things are possible with determination, support, and perhaps a little good luck thrown in for good measure. Even though the book is difficult at times, give it a go...I don't think you'll regret it.
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Roger McEvilly (MSL quote) , Australia
<2007-01-29 00:00>
This book details the career of the distinguished mathematician Dr John Nash, and the title comes from a reply of Dr Nash's to a prestigious job offer from the University of Chicago in 1959 (page 244) when, at the height of his illustrious career, he stated that he had to decline the offer because he was scheduled to become "the Emperor of Antarctica". Of course one might think he was kidding, but there is no doubt that at the time he believed that he was to be involved with a coming world government, and was to be one of its leaders-"Antarctica" may or may not have been his idea of a joke- but the idea certainly wasn't.
Mr Nash was certainly one of the most significant mathematicians of the second half of the 20th century (page 12). This assertion carries some weight, but Mr Nash prior to his descent into paranoid schizophrenia, had in his PHd thesis already solved a major problem with Von Neumann's and Mortgenstern's 1200 page volume "The Theory of Games and Econmic Behaviour" (p97) (for which he eventually won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1994), and solved the embedding problem for manifolds (p 156-163)-which caused quite a stir in academic circles. His PHd thesis was to become one of the major breakthroughs in economic theory in the second half of the 20th century-on non co-operative game theory. It has also been applied successfully to evolutionary biology, amongst other disciplines.
For those who like important names, there are few here-Einstein who kindly said to Nash's ideas about gravitational fields at 19 "you need to do some physics young man", and another- John Von Neumann- regarded as the most multifaceted mathematician of the 20th century (p79), who thought his PHd thesis was "trivial", "just a fixed point theorem". There are a host of other names for those who know mathematical academia better than I.
One of the best things about this book is that it attempts to journey through some of the greatest mysteries of the human mind-as Slyvia Nasar puts it, genius, madness and reawakening (p22). It takes great care to document as much as possible, the facts, and the testimonies of those who directly partook/partake in his life story (some of course who still do). (In this it differs from the general Hollywood style-but to be fair-the film was mostly accurate, and captured the major and important themes). It is one of those cases, where, with perseverance, the book is ultimately more rewarding than the film, and certainly more accurate. One must thank Sylvia Nassar for completing such an important and difficult work. She does so admirably.
Discussions involve his relatively undistinguished childhood (a B- in the 4th grade in arithmetic), his early experimental and scientific tendencies, the politics within 'pure mathematics', the effects of stress, his marital relations, his homosexual tendencies, his extreme arrogance, childish manner, lack of social skills, occasional anti-Semitism (page 146), fear of failure, brilliant mind, the courageous support of his partner-Alicia Nash, and the support of his talented colleagues who did all they could to ameliorate his growing condition-as in the word of one "he was worth doing the very best for" (p304). One particularly moving piece concerns the determination of Alicia at the onset of his terrible illness to save Nash's career and his genius-who by this time was forging into mathematical history- whilst at the same time going completely psychotic. She knew at this point his career and mind "could still be saved", and she risked her own sanity and life, and that of her baby, to try and save it. As Sylvia puts it, "another young woman might have thrown up her hands and gone home to her parents" (p262). And it was fear for her own safety, along with the warning that his condition would deteriorate without treatment, which led her to finally seek commitment, as least for observation (p251).
Some points of diversion with the film; there seems to be little if any visual delusions involved in his case, there were some minor auditory, but the extent of his delusional *beliefs* were not overstated. Paranoia was particularly marked. Delusions included his wife withholding things from him, "why don't you tell me", invasions of aliens, a one world government in which he was to be the leader, the Left Foot of God, a predilection for patterns, letters (b) and dates (May 29) with no significance, and horribly incoherent mathematics. Not good or bad mathematical lectures, but horrible (p246). A description of his condition and that of schizophrenia in general includes pp324-330.
Very detailed, and written in a style where truth is paramount, not fiction, it is a very difficult, deeply disturbing but ultimately very rewarding book.
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Teresa O'Donnell (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-29 00:00>
I was very moved by this story, in all its detail, of a man who was flawed, even before he became ill. I embrace the concept that someone who lacks so much in social and emotional well-being can still be regarded with incredibly high value on the merits of his genius. I was particularly moved by the support he got from his family, ex-wife, and his colleagues who could have easily written him off. More than that, I found the details of his recovery, such that it was, to be inspiring and miraculous. The fascinating struggle of this man, who while sane, preferred to work through problems independently in his own way. True to his personality, he worked through his delusions in much the same way. He thrived and succeeded only when left to 'figure it out' and when not pressured to seek conventional treatment. The value of this very flawed individual is illustrated in this story with such grace.
P.S. I saw the movie. I enjoyed the movie. But it was not the story of John Nash. It would have been far more interesting to tell what really happened to this pathetic, yet triumphant man.
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John Rummel (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-29 00:00>
I first read Sylvia Nasar's biography of John Nash shortly after it was released in 1998. I had heard Nasar interviewed on "All Things Considered" while driving home from work one day, and was intrigued by her story of this enigmatic Princeton mathematician who had emerged from the fog of mental illness to win the Nobel prize in economics in 1994. I borrowed the book from the library and remember vividly what a great glimpse it was into the life of a mathematical genius as well as the tormented hell of schizophrenia.
When Ron Howard made Nasar's book and Nash's life into a movie last year, I knew instantly it was a "must-see." I enjoyed the movie tremendously, but noted the necessary compromises Howard had to make in telling such a complex story on screen in just two hours. I was motivated to finally buy the book and read it carefully again.
A Beautiful Mind is actually three books, intertwined and integrated. The first tells the story of the meteoric rise of the brilliant young mathematician from West Virginia; his college years at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, graduate school at Princeton, followed by fellowships at the RAND Corporation and teaching at M.I.T. His mathematical achievements, including his Nobel winning work in bargaining theory, as well as later (and arguably more mathematically significant) work are well covered in terms that will not be overly obscure for a non-mathematician.
The second book has to do with Nash's personal life, relationships with family, friends, equally brilliant colleagues, his relationship with Eleanor and their illegitimate child, his marriage to Alicia, their child, and subsequent divorce.
The third book details his quirky personality and sudden descent into severe mental illness in 1959, the years of on and off hospitalization, and then the "phantom" years and slow recovery. Nash spent fully 30 years of his life struggling with his delusions, a staggering amount of time lost for such a genius. Nash must still be tormented by the lost promise of what could have been achieved in those years.
It is an intensely fascinating story and Nasar shows her mastery of the facts on every page. Many of the years of drifting and roaming the halls of Princeton's math department in the 1970's and 80's were hard to reconstruct, but she gives an excellent feel for what Nash's life must have been like during those dark times.
Nasar's book also presents a chronology of the development of psychiatry's understanding and treatment of schizophrenia. We see Nash subjected to involuntary hospitalizations, psychotropic drug treatment, insulin therapy (also graphically portrayed in the movie), psychoanalysis, and more. Through his exploits during the dark years, we get a glimpse of the tormented and irrational thought processes that dominate the mind of affected individuals. And we get a sense of the prognosis - normally quite poor - but in Nash's case marked my an apparent remission that has left his mind relatively intact.
Nasar gives fair treatment to the question of post-recovery doubts regarding the initial diagnosis: was Nash really schizophrenic, or did he have some other psychotic condition, but one that has a higher likelihood of recovery (e.g., bi-polar)? The fact that his youngest son was also diagnosed with schizophrenia is telling, since the disorder is now known to have a strong genetic component, but others who look at his history of symptoms already have little reason to doubt the validity of the original diagnosis.
This is a compelling story and an extremely well written book. It is a touching account that has both a fairy-tale ending and an overwhelming sense of tragedy.
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