A Beautiful Mind

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Stories of famously eccentric Princetonians abound--such as that of chemist Hubert Alyea, the model for The Absent-Minded Professor, or Ralph Nader, said to have had his own key to the library as an undergraduate. Or the "Phantom of Fine Hall," a figure many students had seen shuffling around the corridors of the math and physics building wearing purple sneakers and writing numerology treatises on the blackboards. The Phantom was John Nash, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his generation, who had spiraled into schizophrenia in the 1950s. His most important work had been in game theory, which by the 1980s was underpinning a large part of economics. When the Nobel Prize committee began debating a prize for game theory, Nash's name inevitably came up--only to be dismissed, since the prize clearly could not go to a madman. But in 1994 Nash, in remission from schizophrenia, shared the Nobel Prize in economics for work done some 45 years previously.

Economist and journalist Sylvia Nasar has written a biography of Nash that looks at all sides of his life. She gives an intelligent, understandable exposition of his mathematical ideas and a picture of schizophrenia that is evocative but decidedly unromantic. Her story of the machinations behind Nash's Nobel is fascinating and one of very few such accounts available in print (the CIA could learn a thing or two from the Nobel committees). This highly recommended book is indeed "a story about the mystery of the human mind, in three acts: genius, madness, reawakening." --Mary Ellen Curtin


From Publishers Weekly
Nasar has written a notable biography of mathematical genius John Forbes Nash (b. 1928), a founder of game theory, a RAND Cold War strategist and winner of a 1994 Nobel Prize in economics. She charts his plunge into paranoid schizophrenia beginning at age 30 and his spontaneous recovery in the early 1990s after decades of torment. He attributes his remission to will power; he stopped taking antipsychotic drugs in 1970 but underwent a half-dozen involuntary hospitalizations. Born in West Virginia, the flamboyant mathematical wizard rubbed elbows at Princeton and MIT with Einstein, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener. He compartmentalized his secret personal life, shows Nasar, hiding his homosexual affairs with colleagues from his mistress, a nurse who bore him a son out of wedlock, while he also courted Alicia Larde, an MIT physics student whom he married in 1957. Their son, John, born in 1959, became a mathematician and suffers from episodic schizophrenia. Alicia divorced Nash in 1963, but they began living together again as a couple around 1970. Today Nash, whose mathematical contributions span cosmology, geometry, computer architecture and international trade, devotes himself to caring for his son. Nasar, an economics correspondent for the New York Times, is equally adept at probing the puzzle of schizophrenia and giving a nontechnical context for Nash's mathematical and scientific ideas. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
John Forbes Nash's mathematical research would eventually win him a Nobel prize, but only after he recovered from decades of mental illness. Nasar tells a story of triumph, tragedy, and enduring love. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Simon Singh
A Beautiful Mind tells a moving story and offers a remarkable look into the arcane world of mathematics and the tragedy of madness.


From The New England Journal of Medicine, July 16, 1998
It is a common belief that once schizophrenia has bored its way deep into a person's mind, the losses are irretrievable. But over the past decade or so, many patients have had their lives greatly enhanced by the new antipsychotic medications; others, admittedly few, improve in midlife without any treatment whatsoever. One person who seems to have had a substantial midlife improvement is Professor John Nash, who was first brought to the general public's attention by Sylvia Nasar in a 1994 New York Times article. Not only was Nash improving after having been severely ill with paranoid schizophrenia for 30 years, but also he had just won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his stunningly original contributions to game theory. Knowledge of his successful struggle with psychosis brought hope to the millions of people with schizophrenia, their families, and those involved in their care. It also raised intriguing questions about the relation between mental illness and creativity. Although artistic imagination has been associated, often controversially, with madness for thousands of years, there are now at least twenty studies demonstrating that the increased rates of mental illness in highly creative groups are almost invariably due to manic-depressive illness or other forms of mood disorders. No empirical studies have linked schizophrenia with creativity. Generally, if people with severe forms of schizophrenia have creative ideas, the illness is too debilitating for the creativity to be expressed in a productive, coherent, or sustained manner. Yet on rare occasions, important and original thinking may come from some aspects of schizophrenia. There are people, with less severe or atypical forms of the illness, who see the world in a way it has not been seen before. And rarely, when the world that they can understand is, in turn, newly understood and appreciated by others, we acknowledge that it has been created by genius. In A Beautiful Mind, Nasar tells the painful yet ultimately remarkable story of Nash and the world around him. Nash, although always a person given to isolation, appears to have won the fierce loyalty of a surprisingly large number of people. The most important of these, his former wife, Alicia, continued to care for him during his many years of psychotic breakdowns, despair, and intellectual isolation. On one level, Nash's story is a historical road map of some of the most important scientific scenes of this century. Post-World War II Princeton and its Institute for Advanced Study was home to an extraordinary collection of minds and personalities, including those of Albert Einstein, Kurt Godel, Robert Oppenheimer, and John von Neumann. The last, with his collaborator Oskar Morgenstern, had developed a systematic mathematical description of games as an approach to rational thinking about economics. They described the zero-sum, two-person game that assumes total conflict or "perfect competition." In their model there was, of necessity, a complete winner and a complete loser. In essence, they described an all-out war between the participants. Challenged by the flaws and gaps in this approach, Nash, then a first-year graduate student, developed various approaches to the "bargaining problem." How do parties bargain or compromise to solve a problem? We strike deals out of self-interest. His thinking and the mathematical foundation of his work became, in turn, the foundation of much of modern theoretical and experimental economics. It was Nash's notion that spawned what later became known as the problem of the "prisoner's dilemma." Neither Nash's work nor his personal life was able to progress smoothly. Within a few years, he was overtly psychotic. Nash had always been odd, but over time, his behavior became increasingly bizarre and inappropriate. His mullings became utterly incomprehensible, and his actions disturbingly erratic. His delusions and hallucinations were severe, and he was involuntarily committed to psychiatric hospitals on several occasions. The severe symptoms of his schizophrenia lasted 30 years. But gradually, those who knew him noted that he was improving. It was perhaps no coincidence that the Nobel prize committee, which, not unlike the United States Supreme Court, deliberates in rather arcane secrecy, began at this time considering his past achievements for the highest honor in economics. Nasar, with admirable sleuthing and tenacity, was able to delve into the politicking surrounding the deliberations of the committee. Full of intrigue, the committee became an arena for principle, stubbornness, personal persuasiveness, and not surprisingly, extraordinary pettiness. Although being a bit mad was certainly no disqualification for receiving the Nobel prize, it was quite another thing to award it to a man who was very mad and who could easily embarrass himself or, more disconcertingly, the Nobel Foundation. To the committee's credit, it did award the prize to Nash, who immediately demonstrated his rationality: the afternoon he received the Nobel prize he commented that he hoped it would improve his credit rating. Nasar has written an intriguing account of a fascinating man, of a "beautiful" mind, and of terrible madness. She has also written a deeply moving love story, an account of the centrality of human relationships in a world of nightmare and genius. Reviewed by Richard J. Wyatt, M.D.
Copyright © 1998 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS.


Wall Street Journal, Charles C. Mann
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.


The New York Times, David Goodstein
[Sylvia Nasar] has written a biography of Nash that reads like a fine novel.


From AudioFile
Edward Herrmann continues to add to a great body of work, including television, theater and feature films, with his narration of mathematician John Nash's life. With his commanding voice, Herrmann traces Nash's life from his "normal" childhood to his mathematical genius to his mental decline from schizophrenia in this abridgment of Nasar's riveting biography. Herrmann's unbiased reading of Nash's strong personality and egotistical nature keeps the listener from disliking Nash for his indifference to those around him, yet Herrmann brings the listener full circle with his thoughtful and philosophical reading of Nash as an older and wiser man. Herrmann manages to keep a great perspective on Nash's actions and his mental illness, providing a good, solid reading of the life of a genius. H.L.S. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Rarely has the fragility of the boundary separating genius from madness been illustrated with more compelling insight than in this biography of John Nash, a Nobel laureate in economics and one of this century's greatest mathematicians. Untangling the strands of this perplexing life requires the rare author who can explicate the complex rationality of differential calculus and also plumb the bizarre illogic of schizophrenia. Nasar identifies the earliest signs of a prodigy in the sloppy and introverted child who played with magnets and found shortcuts for doing fourth-grade arithmetic. She diagnoses the first symptoms of mental instability in the MIT scholar who astonishes the world with his bold solutions to impossible problems. And she detects the first stirrings of recovery in the pathetic specter wandering the halls of Princeton. To fully appreciate Nash's career accomplishments, readers must have some grasp of advanced mathematics. But Nasar tells the story of a great mind broken and then healed with subtle sympathy, which will touch any reader who understands what it means to hope--or to fear. Bryce Christensen


From Kirkus Reviews
A biography about a mathematical genius who suffered from schizophrenia, miraculously recovered, and later received the Nobel Prize in 1994. Nasar, an economics correspondent for the New York Times, opens her book with the spectral image of John Forbes Nash Jr., who haunted the Princeton University campus where he had once been a promising graduate student. Nash, the son of conservative southern parents, rose rapidly through the ranks of equally brilliant mathematicians during the 1950s. Then, at the age of 31 and at the height of his career, Nash experienced the first of many breakdowns and was later diagnosed with schizophrenia. Nasar attempts to write an ambitious biography. It is, on one level, an in-depth look at this mysterious figure and his milieu and, on another level, a meditation on the nature of genius and madness. On the first level, Nasar succeeds, providing a sense of the rarefied and competitive atmosphere of mathematics departments in the nation's leading universities during the height of the Cold War. The peripheral characters of the book are vividly drawn, and episodes in Nash's life are painted with an extraordinary attention to detail. She also presents advanced mathematical theories in an accessible and palatable way. However, her efforts to get at the heart of Nash's disease fall short. A great deal of speculation is made about his early childhood, his homosexual liaisons, and his arrest for solicitation in this pre-Stonewall era. And even more is made of his bizarre and generally antisocial behavior before the breakdown. By the time Nasar reaches Nash's first psychotic episode, the reader is struck, not by his genius, but by his maladjusted behavior. By the end of the book, Nash remains as much of an enigma as he was before. Impressively researched and detailed, but still fails to shed much light on the mysteries of genius and insanity. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


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Every once in a while there appears a book on science that mirrors the splendor of its subject. Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind is such a book -- an eloquent, heartbreaking, and heartwarming tale. — Timothy Ferris


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