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A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash (Paperback) (Paperback)
by Sylvia Nasar
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Biography, Story |
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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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Author: Sylvia Nasar
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Pub. in: November, 2001
ISBN: 0743224574
Pages: 464
Measurements: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00282
Other information: Reissue edition
ISBN-13: 978-0743224574
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- Awards & Credential -
The National Bestseller, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. |
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It's no wonder the life of John Nash has captured the imagination of American readers and moviegoers. Here is a man who spent his life in two worlds most of us never experience. For ten years, Nash devoted himself to the estranged, eccentric, "ivory tower" world of abstract mathematical research, where his unbelievable feats of intellect were matched only by his extreme social and sexual immaturity. His peers recognized him as being a true genius, but his often mean-spirited behavior and utter selfishness turned people off and resulted in his being passed over for important awards and university positions. Then, he suffered a schizophrenic break, and spent the next thirty years in and out of mental hospitals, undergoing electroshock and insulin coma therapy, haunted by complex, fanciful delusions that he was at the center of vast government and alien conspiracies. Supported only by his wife and a few friends, he eventually recovered and was awarded a Nobel Prize for his contributions to the field of economics and his research into game theory. It was the story of a life worth reading.
Unlike the movie, which omitted the seedier side of Nash's life in order to make him more sympathetic, Sylvia Nasar does not pull her punches. Her book explores the entire man - his intellectual brilliance, his emotional aloofness, his insecurity, and his willingness to prey sexually on men and women desperate for affection. It neither lionizes him for his accomplishments nor demonizes him for his faults. With detached objectivity, she describes both his "discovery" of a new equilibrium in cooperative games and his abandonment of a mistress and illegitimate son.
Target readers:
General readers
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- Better with -
Better with
Einstein: His Life and Universe
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The movie inspired by Sylvia Nasar's award-winning #1 New York Times bestseller, A Beautiful Mind, has enthralled audiences around the world and helped put a human face on a devastating mental illness. One of the most critically-acclaimed Hollywood films of recent years, A Beautiful Mind won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actress and Screenplay.
Nasar discovered the remarkable story of Nobel Laureate John Nash as an economics reporter for the New York Times. A business journalist who had been a staff writer at Fortune and a columnist at U.S. News & World Report, she was fascinated both by Nash’s intellectual achievements and his extraordinary triumph over schizophrenia. Her story, "The Lost Years of the Nobel Laureate," depicted his life as a drama about the mystery of the mind in three acts: genius, madness, reawakening.
Nasar's biography won the National Book Critics' Circle Award and was a Pulitzer finalist in 1998. Four years later, A Beautiful Mind once again attracted national attention, this time as a box-office blockbuster directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe.
Nasar's book is a beautifully crafted exploration of the life and mind of John Nash, an intellectual giant in the generation that drove science and mathematics to the forefront of American consciousness. In a 27-page Ph.D. thesis for which he won a Nobel in economics decades later, the eccentric 21-year old invented a theory that has transformed modern social science and been applied to everything from business strategy and warfare to the evolution of the species and international trade.
We got great feedback, she was so gracious, she has tremendous warmth for her subject and we were very moved by her story.
-Strong Investments
Nash proved to be "the most remarkable mathematician of the second half of the century." But at age 30, a celebrity in the rarefied world of mathematics and seemingly on the verge of more breakthroughs, Nash's beautiful mind betrayed him. The source of his stunning original insights became that of bizarre delusions and terrifying hallucinations.
For 30 years, Nash was known as the Phantom of Fine Hall at Princeton University. Schizophrenia had robbed him of everything except the love of a beautiful woman and the loyalty of a handful of colleagues. Then suddenly, after three decades, Nash slowly woke up, and the recognition of his great work, long denied because of his illness, culminated in the Nobel Prize.
Nasar is the first Knight Professor of Business Journalism at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge University and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. She is currently working on a book about 20th century economic thinkers.
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How could you, a mathematician, believe that extraterrestrials were sending you messages?" the visitor from Harvard asked the West Virginian with the movie-star looks and Olympian manner.
"Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did," came the answer. "So I took them seriously."
Thus begins the true story of John Nash, the mathematical genius who was a legend by age thirty when he slipped into madness, and who - thanks to the selflessness of a beautiful woman and the loyalty of the mathematics community - emerged after decades of ghostlike existence to win a Nobel Prize and world acclaim. The inspiration for a major motion picture, Sylvia Nasar's award-winning biography is a drama about the mystery of the human mind, triumph over incredible adversity, and the healing power of love.
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Prologue
Where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,
The marble index of a mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.
- WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
John Forbes Nash, Jr. - mathematical genius, inventor of a theory of rational behavior, visionary of the thinking machine - had been sitting with his visitor, also a mathematician, for nearly half an hour. It was late on a weekday afternoon in the spring of 1959, and, though it was only May, uncomfortably warm. Nash was slumped in an armchair in one corner of the hospital lounge, carelessly dressed in a nylon shirt that hung limply over his unbelted trousers. His powerful frame was slack as a rag doll's, his finely molded features expressionless. He had been staring dully at a spot immediately in front of the left foot of Harvard professor George Mackey, hardly moving except to brush his long dark hair away from his forehead in a fitful, repetitive motion. His visitor sat upright, oppressed by the silence, acutely conscious that the doors to the room were locked. Mackey finally could contain himself no longer. His voice was slightly querulous, but he strained to be gentle. "How could you," began Mackey, "how could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof...how could you believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world? How could you...?"
Nash looked up at last and fixed Mackey with an unblinking stare as cool and dispassionate as that of any bird or snake. "Because," Nash said slowly in his soft, reasonable southern drawl, as if talking to himself, "the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously."
The young genius from Bluefield, West Virginia -- handsome, arrogant, and highly eccentric - burst onto the mathematical scene in 1948. Over the next decade, a decade as notable for its supreme faith in human rationality as for its dark anxieties about mankind's survival, Nash proved himself, in the words of the eminent geometer Mikhail Gromov, "the most remarkable mathematician of the second half of the century." Games of strategy, economic rivalry, computer architecture, the shape of the universe, the geometry of imaginary spaces, the mystery of prime numbers -- all engaged his wide-ranging imagination. His ideas were of the deep and wholly unanticipated kind that pushes scientific thinking in new directions.
Geniuses, the mathematician Paul Halmos wrote, "are of two kinds: the ones who are just like all of us, but very much more so, and the ones who, apparently, have an extra human spark. We can all run, and some of us can run the mile in less than 4 minutes; but there is nothing that most of us can do that compares with the creation of the Great G-minor Fugue." Nash's genius was of that mysterious variety more often associated with music and art than with the oldest of all sciences: It wasn't merely that his mind worked faster, that his memory was more retentive, or that his power of concentration was greater. The flashes of intuition were nonrational. Like other great mathematical intuitionists - Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, Jules Henri Poincaré, Srinivasa Ramanujan - Nash saw the vision first; constructing the laborious proofs long afterward. But even after he'd try to explain some astonishing result, the actual route he had taken remained a mystery to others who tried to follow his reasoning. Donald Newman, a mathematician who knew Nash at MIT in the 1950s, used to say about him that "everyone else would climb a peak by looking for a path somewhere on the mountain. Nash would climb another mountain altogether and from that distant peak would shine a searchlight back onto the first peak."
No one was more obsessed with originality, more disdainful of authority, or more jealous of his independence. As a young man he was surrounded by the high priests of twentieth-century science - Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener - but he joined no school, became no one's disciple, got along: largely without guides or followers. In almost everything he did - from game theory to geometry - he thumbed his nose at the received wisdom, current fashions, established methods. He almost always worked alone, in his head, usually walking, often whistling Bach. Nash acquired his knowledge of mathematics not mainly from studying what Other mathematicians had discovered, but by rediscovering their truths for himself. Eager to astound, he was always on the lookout for the really big problems. When he focused on some new puzzle, he saw dimensions that people who really knew the subject (he never did) initially dismissed as naive or wrong-headed. Even as a student, his indifference to others' skepticism, doubt, and ridicule was awesome.
Nash's faith in rationality and the power of pure thought was extreme, even for a very young mathematician and even for the new age of computers, space travel, and nuclear weapons. Einstein once chided him for wishing to amend relativity theory without studying physics. His heroes were solitary thinkers and supermen like Newton and Nietzsche. Computers and science fiction were his passions. He considered "thinking machines," as he called them, superior in some ways to human beings. At one point, he became fascinated by the possibility that drugs could heighten physical and intellectual performance. He was beguiled by the idea of alien races of hyper-rational beings who had taught themselves to disregard all emotion, Compulsively rational, he wished to turn life's decisions - whether to take the first elevator or wait for the next one, where to bank his money, what job to accept, whether to marry - into calculations of advantage and disadvantage, algorithms or mathematical rules divorced from emotion, convention, and tradition. Even the small act of saying an automatic hello to Nash in a hallway could elicit a furious "Why are you saying hello to me?"
His contemporaries, on the whole, found him immensely strange. They described him as "aloof," "haughty," "without affect," "detached," "spooky," "isolated," and "queer." Nash mingled rather than mixed with his peers. Preoccupied with his own private reality, he seemed not to share their mundane concerns. His manner - slightly cold, a bit superior, somewhat secretive - suggested something "mysterious and unnatural." His remoteness was punctuated by flights of garrulousness about outer space and geopolitical trends, childish pranks, and unpredictable eruptions of anger. But these outbursts were, more often than not, as enigmatic as his silences. "He is not one of us" was a constant refrain. A mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study remembers meeting Nash for the first time at a crowded student party at Princeton:
I noticed him very definitely among a lot of other people who were there. He was sitting on the floor in a half-circle discussing something. He made me feel uneasy. He gave me a peculiar feeling. I had a feeling of a certain strangeness. He was different in some way. I was not aware of the extent of his talent. I had no idea he would contribute as much as he really did.
But he did contribute, in a big way. The marvelous paradox was that the ideas themselves were not obscure. In 1958, Fortune singled Nash out for his achievements in game theory, algebraic geometry, and nonlinear theory, calling him the most brilliant of the younger generation of new ambidextrous mathematicians who worked in both pure and applied mathematics. Nash'S insight into the dynamics of human rivalry - his theory of rational conflict and cooperation - was to become one of the most influential ideas Of the twentieth century, transforming the young science of economics the way that Mendel's ideas of genetic transmission, Darwin's model of natural selection, and Newton's celestial mechanics reshaped biology and physics in their day.
It was the great Hungarian-born polymath John von Neumann who first recognized that social behavior Could be analyzed as games. Von Neumann's 1928 article on parlor games was the first successful attempt to derive logical and mathematical rules about rivalries. Just as Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand, great scientists have often looked for clues to vast and complex problems in the small, familiar phenomena of daily life. Isaac Newton reached insights about the heavens by juggling wooden balls. Einstein contemplated a boat paddling upriver. Von Neumann pondered the game of poker.
A seemingly trivial and playful pursuit like poker, von Neumann argued, might hold the key to more serious human affairs for two reasons. Both poker and economic competition require a certain type of reasoning, namely the rational calculation of advantage and disadvantage based on some internally consistent system of values ("more is better than less"). And in both, the outcome for any individual actor depends not only on his own actions, but on the independent actions of others.
More than a century earlier, the French economist Antoine-Augustin Cournot had pointed out that problems of economic choice were greatly simplified when either none or a large number of other agents were present). Alone on his island, Robinson Crusoe doesn't have to worry about others whose actions might affect him. Neither, though, do Adam Smith's butchers and bakers. They live in a world with so many actors that their actions, in effect, cancel each other out. But when there is more than one agent but not so many that their influence may be safely ignored, strategic behavior raises a seemingly insoluble problem: "I think that he thinks that I think that he thinks," and so forth.
Von Neumann was able to give a convincing solution to this problem of circular reasoning for games that are two-person, zero-sum games, games in which one player's gain is another's loss. But zero-sum games are the ones least applicable to economics (as one writer put it, the zero-sum game is to ...
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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. |
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. |
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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