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A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash

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Saw and tremendously enjoyed the movie, but kept thinking, this can't be the real story of John Nash. As impressed as I was with director Ron Howard's construction and Russell Crowe's acting, I still left the theater with too many questions...and doubts.

For the first time I can recall, I departed a movie and went directly to a bookstore to buy the book. (I'm still 100% on never purchasing a soundtrack CD from one of those theater vending machines.) This is NOT the same story as the movie. Nasar's biography of Nash is a thoroughly researched, riviting story that took me to worlds I've never known (advanced mathmatics and severe mental illness). It is a fast-paced read, a book I could not put down.

There has been controversy about some of the details from the book being left out of the movie, but I think Ron Howard departed masterfully from the book to provide the escence of Nash's story without bogging down in some confusing issues that Nasar, in a book form, handles with appropriate detail and context.

Watch the movie and read the book. Both are great. But they are different.

If you enjoyed the movie "A Beautiful Mind" you will love this book. It is far richer in detail, context, and let's us a bit deeper into why what Nash accomplished was so beautiful. If you find the movie a bit of a problem because it seems a bit too glossy for the facts, again, you will love this book.

For me, the movie did a marvelous job of embodying the spirit of the book. To delve more deeply into the facts of Nash's life and accomplishments and his illness would require a documentary or a mini-series. The movie is really a narrative poem about Nash. This book is about the people and their experiences. It is NOT a direct exposition of Nash's technical achievements. There are other books such as "The Essential John Nash" that provide that information.

In this masterful book we find out more about his youth, his life at college, his work after he received his doctorate and his breakdown and illness as well as the nature and scope of his recovery. There is real sorrow and loss in the book, but there is also strength and tenacity that refuses to yield to hopelessness and despair. This is a book about the people and how they lived during the storms of his achievements and his illness.

I am not qualified to discuss the quality of Nash's achievements, but from the admiration lavished on him by his peers and how they rallied round him it is clear that Nash was given immense gifts that he developed and used in ways that have benefited all of us even if we are unaware it.

It seems that this is the nature of the gifts scientists and mathematicians give us. We are unaware of them until another person makes them part of other products, services, and policies that directly affect us. And even then we are unaware of the breakthroughs that made these wonderful additions to our lives possible.

We should be grateful to Sylvia Nasar for helping us see the gifts we received from Dr. Nash and the sacrifices his wife and others made to make them possible.

While I wasn't gripped by this biography until about a third of the way through, when it grabbed my attention it did so powerfully. While I agree with the reviewer below who suggests that this is not the book to read if you're interested exclusively in the the technical features of Nash's mathematical contributions, I believe that this criticism is misplaced. The book (it seems to me) is intended for an intelligent lay audience; it doesn't pretend to be a survey of his scientific accomplishments and failures.

I was especially struck by the truly immense amount of competition that exists among math scholars for status. Although portraying this competition is hardly the principal aim of Nasar's beautiful book, she conveys the intensity of the struggle among scholars for recognition with impressive clarity and perspective.

I was led to the book by a movie review in the NYT that said the movie did not tell the story of the book and that it was very serious and important story. I am writing this review because having read it I would like to discuss it.

Though there is some redundancy in the text, I still read every word. The exploration of the themes of genius and acknowledged contributions, followed by more than 30 years of paranoid schizophrenia and then remission and recognition is gripping.

The care of the biographer in acknowledging and noting her sources is very unusual for most popular and semi-popular biographers. That she took her subject and his work and his journey seriously is never in doubt. There is no pseudo psych. There is lots of exploration. The author explores very sensitive areas thou rally, but sensitively.

Nash's homosexuality, his seeming contempt for people and their feelings nothing is left out. His forty-five year relationship with the woman who has been his wife is not a simple story and the author takes her time to present the facts. Still, she does not judge, she reports.

I did enjoy the sections about Princeton and MIT and the world of mathematicians. An economics PhD candidate I had dinner with said, "I heard it's all about relationships and not mathematics". The mathematicians in the book say economics is not very serious math. (Nash seems to agree with that in an ironic way.)

In short I was charmed by the book, it gave me a lot a material with which to consider the nature of genius, mathematical accomplishment, mental illness and (particularly the effect of other people on ones sense of self) and what is meant by a whole life.

I understand that there is a lot of talk about love in the movie. In the book the word is not mentioned once-these are not touchy feely folk, still love and friendship are very important to the story.

Read the book.

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 pretigious 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 perserverance, 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 indistinguished 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 ameloriate 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 predeliction for patterns, letters (b) and dates (May 29) with no signficance, and horribly incoherant mathematics. Not good or bad mathemetical 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.

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.

Sylvia Nasar writes a wonderful biography of the life of John Nash. We see Nash as an unhappy child who finds success in mathematics and becomes both arrogant and self-centered. He sets high goals but falls short failing to win the Fields medal. Yet he makes phenomenal mathematical discoveries and his work in game theory had a major impact in the field of economics. Alicia is a wonderful wife who keeps things together when John starts having his bouts with depression and insanity. At times he is unable to function and then at other times he recovers and shows signs of his former brilliance.

We feel that we understand him. The Nobel Prize in economics would rightfully have been his long ago because of tremendous impact of his equilibrium theory. However, it seems that the Nobel committee is reluctant to award the prize to someone who needs to spend much of his time in a mental institution.

Miraculously Nash recovers in the 1990s and is awarded the prize in 1995. The story is heartwarming and reads like great fiction but it is actually true!

This was made into a well done movie that I also enjoyed very much.

A very comprehensive biography takes us on a journey from a small West Virginia town where Nash was born to his current state of tentatively sane semi-retirement that he shares with his ex-wife Alicia. This is a biography of one of the most insightful American mathematicians. Nash gave brilliant intuitive and relevant ideas their precise mathematical formulations. The best known of these is Nash Equilibrium. In non-cooperative games (competition only, no coalitions allowed) with perfect information (all possibilities are in principle knowable, even if not in practice known to all competitors) there exists the best strategy leading to a predetermined outcome. This is why games such as chess and checkers are in principle solvable--the outcome is determined even before any moves are made. The reason these games remain interesting (at least at the time of the writing) is because players do not know the most rational strategy and thus make "mistakes," leading to outcomes that are for practical purposes not exactly predictable.

Like many artistic, scientific, and political geniuses, Nash came from a small town and a family that had to struggle finanically. Yet he adopted an aloof and superior approach toward the people he met as a student and later as a mathematician. He was frequently arrogant, aggressive, and inappropriately sarcastic. Morality seemed to him a thinly veiled hypocricy. In this light it is not surprising that Nash admired Nietzsche. Nash behaved rudely and even cruelly toward those who loved him, including his mistress Eleanor (who seems to me to have been his common law wife), his devoted wife Alicia, and both of his sons. I am amazed that after Nash fell desperately ill, many of his colleagues, members of the U.S. government, and his wife remained so loyal, helpful, and concerned.

Nash seems to have recovered from paranoid schizophrenia by the early 1990s and was awarded Nobel Prize in economics. This may have been well deserved, because much of the field of economics has been recast in the language of game theory (cooperative and non-cooperative), and Nash was a key contributor whom no one could ignore, especially after the Nobel Committee decided to focus only on non-cooperative games for its 1994 Prize.

One may find it challenging to feel very sympathetic towards Nash because of his arrogance, unbridled sarcasm, insensitive put-downs, and downright cruelty towards those who cared about him. Many have noted that during his illness Nash was a better person, even if he could not exercise his mathematical faculties much of the time. After his remission, Nash partly reverted to his old ways, speaking cruelly to his elder son John Stier who tried to reestablish the relationship, and occasionally hurting Alicia with his stupid verbal behavior. Given Nash's personality, it is not surprising that he made the great discovery of the so-called equilibrium that bears his name. Nash abolished players--their emotions, their preferences, their entire psychology, all gone! Only the game remains. Games have solutions, people who play them do not count in arriving at these solutions. The man who was a mathematical genius and who lacked empathy and compassion was fortuitously positioned to arrive at that important formulation.

The book is not just interesting, but sometimes gripping. The only minor flaw is that occasionally characters are introduced into the narrative out of the blue, followed by a strangely detailed description of theier appearance and behavior, even when it is not obvious why such a detailed description is necessary. This makes the book a bit choppy. But overall this is an enjoyable, provocative, and educational read. I recommend the book.

This was probably the best book I've read in the last ten years. I stayed up three nights in a row to finish it (which is saying a lot when you have a two-year old!). Part of the fascination lay in the fact that I grew up in Princeton, my Dad was at the Plasma Physics Lab and my family knew a lot of people in the book. Also, Nash and his family live about a mile from me. But beyond that, it is simply a breathtaking story told extremely well.

The book affected me very much on an emotional level, yet I did not feel a lot of sympathy for most of the characters. To me, the only hero in the whole book is Nash's son John by his mistress Eleanor.

Nash's behavior towards this child (allowing/forcing him to be kept in foster homes and even an orphanage for the first six years of his life because he didn't want to provide money to his working-class mother so she could keep him with her) is nothing more than the most callous child abuse imaginable. This son has a history which is very common in children who grow up to be sociopathic criminals. It is truly amazing how well this kid turned out.

I felt sorry for the mother of this child, yet she allowed this to go on for six years in the hopes that Nash would marry her, when she could have simply taken her child back and found someway to struggle through. Nash's parents knew of this child and did nothing. Nash's fiance, later wife, Alicia, apparently wasn't concerned that the man she was about to marry was capable of this kind of behavior. Her desire to marry a famous man and move in celebrity circles outweighed the obvious conclusion that if Nash could do this to one woman and child, he could do it to another. Presumably she felt that her social status and education would protect her.

I do also feel sorry for his schizophrenic son by Alicia. Not only did he have the genetic load he inherited from his father, but growing up with a schizophrenic father must have been very difficult. A friend of mine had a father who was a professor at Princeton and who became schizophrenic after he was married with three children. He used to tell her things like "the Nazis are putting thoughts in my mind." You can imagine the fear and terror that living with an frankly insane parent would generate in a young child.

According to the book, Nash has still not yet fully accepted his older son in that he criticizes him for not having obtained a professional degree. Yet his younger son, who has a Ph.D., suffers from mental illness and his degree has brought him neither success nor happiness. So, in spite of all that Nash has been through and learned, he doesn't seem to have come to the famous insight reached by St. Theresa: "We are not called upon to be successful; we are called upon to be faithful."

In the end, Alicia redeemed herself and Nash through her faithfulness. Nash has been faithful only to mathematics. It is his great good fortune that so many have chosen to be faithful to him.

I generally hate biographies. They are usually heavily loaded with details of no significance while lacking in a larger
meaning, plus most of their subjects wind up dead, thus defeating the purpose of biography (to make living seem
significant) and I wind up depressed by the whole exercise -- life always seems so pointless after reading a biography. I
make two exceptions to this: Boswell's Life of Johnson and this biography (obviously, I don't seek this kind of literary
genre so I realize I may have overlooked a few good ones). This book is less a biography in the usual sense than an
exploration of a human being with a special talent/obsession -- mathematics. Reading this book made me realize that
mathematics is really a branch of art and depends on living on the edge (close to insanity) so as to fish insight from the
chaos just on the other side of rationality. Creativity without danger is worthless.

John Forbes Nash was clearly not a "people" person although there is something appealing about him despite his
arrogance, ambition and vanity -- he is a truth teller, and while we all pretend to admire truth tellers, we always prefer
those who don't go near that cold inhospitable country. That he went mad seemed almost inevitable given the extent of his
ambition and hubris -- he wanted to fish out the biggest of mathematical fish and when he realized that his incapacity for
study and overestimation of his own talent and inspiration meant that his fish had already been landed by other
mathematicians and/or found to be illusory, he chose the lesser of two evils -- insanity. Anything but to become just
another mediocrity. He plunged into numerology (became a kind of numerical visionary) leaving strange little
numerological messages all over Fine Hall which he haunted like a prescient ghost. In his public life, he became an actor
in his own paranoid delusion, traveling here and there, trying to obtain citizenship in one country while forfeiting it in
another, an ad hoc peace broker. Like most paranoiacs, his delusions were solipsistic yet formulaic, following his political
inclinations. At Princeton, people who came across these little bursts of enigmatic enlightenment left on the walls and
blackboards felt moved to write them down. He lived like this for some 30 years, and then for some reason known only
to himself (he explains it as having realized that he could rein in his paranoiac ideation by simply recognizing when he was
beginning to go down that road and turning his thoughts elsewhere). This realization, by the way, puts him way up there in
my estimation. He learned to control his own mind, to make his return to sanity a triumph rather than a sad defeat. He
recognized where the danger lay and learned to avoid it when he wanted to. When he returned to the flatland of reason,
he never turned against his mad self. In fact, he said that his mathematical inspiration came from the same place as his
so-called delusional thinking. (Here's an idea: what if paranoid delusions are not really insane; they only seem so because
each person with these ideas couches them in a personal way, dresses them eccentrically according to whim, and we are
fooled by how silly they look rather than by how consistent they are from one so-called paranoid individual to the next --
maybe there is something out there taking over our minds. Maybe that's why our minds are so limited and getting more so
all the time. We haven't always been this stupid). His winning the Nobel Prize at this late stage was also a proof of his
great personal power. The Nobel Prize committee had deep reservations about the public relations danger of giving a prize to a man who had been publicly insane for 30 years. He won it also not for mathematics but in economics (a hotly debated topic -- many considered economics as a discipline unworthy of a Nobel Prize). The portion of the book about the Nobel Prize is just great. We get a good look at how this system works, how it keeps its equilibrium in the world of high thought and keeps its credibility by not making too many odd/wrong choices. I also liked the speech he gave when accepting it. He had put a great deal of single minded intentionality into winning a great prize and that he won the Nobel seems less a credit to the committee than to this man's indomitable will. At the same time, he had
lived past the sheer need for fame and he received it merely as a token to his young self (for his young self's work in
games theory) and was appreciative that it allowed him to obtain a credit card. I like his aside during his Nobel speech when he parenthetically gave an acknowledgment to his insane self -- his alter ego.

Other oddly mathematical touches in his life: two sons named John. One was illegitimate by a woman who clung to the
hope that Nash would marry her at some point or at least support her and her offspring. He never did. He married a
beauty (a physicist) instead -- Alicia -- and produced another son named John. This John has been diagnosed paranoid
schizophrenic. He had his father's footsteps to follow. In his meetings with this John, Nash sees himself at that age and
tells John not to indulge in insanity. Nash is a man who lived according to his own lights. His was not a social life, yet it is
instructive and it gives hope to people who refuse to conform to the social model. This great biography makes this clear.

(...)