A Beautiful Mind, John Forbes Nash and the Rainbow's End
Written: Nov 30 '00 (Updated Jun 02 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Well researched, in depth, clearly written
Cons: None
The Bottom Line: Extremely well researched, fascinating and inspiring.
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| Stloraine's Full Review: Sylvia Nasar - Beautiful Mind |
A biography about Princeton scholar and Nobel prize recipient, A Beautiful Mind, John Forbes Nash, Jr. by Sylvia Nasar. Published 1998 by Simon and Schuster. Winner of Critics Circle Award. The book is presently scheduled for the March 2001 film production starring Russell Crowe as John Nash and directed by Ron Howard.
John Forbes Nash, Jr. was born on June 13, 1928 to John Forbes Nash, Sr. and Virginia Martin in Bluefield, West Virginia. His sister Martha was born two years later. The father was an engineer and mother a teacher. His childhood was normal, but he did not relate emotionally to the other boys, he was thought of as remote and different from the rest, at times confrontational. Tall, athletic, blond and blue-eyed, he was bright and inquisitive, his favorite book being Bell’s Men of Mathematics.
He attended Carnegie Institute from 1945 to 1948, and, achieving his B.A. was offered scholarships to graduate studies at Michigan, Chicago and Harvard. But Princeton, which was trying to build up its mathematics department, offered a richer fellowship, so at age twenty he entered Princeton and began work on his doctoral thesis, attaining his Ph.D. in mathematics at twenty-one. His 27 page thesis which became known as the “Nash Equilibrium Theory” was a further development of Game Theory, which was to earn him international academic recognition when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994.
His life story is amazing because he entered Princeton a young genius, recognized as possessing extraordinary mathematical ability by his teachers and fellow students. He rubbed shoulders with the best at Princeton, including meeting Einstein who was then in residence there. He was subsequently to suffer a disastrous period of mental instability and social ignominy from which he was to rebound years later to win a coveted Nobel, be the subject of an award winning book and the subject of a movie starring Russell Crowe. He attended the afternoon student-faculty teas at Fine Hall, played board games and engaged in lively discussions with his fellow students, accepting the most difficult challenges they could hurl at him. He amazed them by solving an up to that time unsolvable Riemann hypothesis elegantly. Other times he spent taking walks while whistling Bach.
When he had finished his studies he was hired as one of an elite group of scientists by the government top secret Rand Corporation. He worked there part time for several seasons, was offered a permanent position but did not want to settle down. He returned to Princeton, New Jersey where he was hired to teach undergraduates, but lost interest and took a position at MIT.
Game Theory was the brainchild of John Von Neumann but it had not been usefully applied because it consisted mainly of two player zero sum games. Nash developed it further to include multiple players in noncooperative situations where each player had to play his best game in response to his opponent’s best strategy. He proved that every game reaches a state of equilibrium where none of the players can improve their position…The Nash Equilibrium Theory. While it won the Nobel for Economics, it has been used in military strategy, analyzing candidates’ election strategies, causes of war, agenda manipulation in legislatures and atomic bomb negotiations. However, he and his peers do not consider it his finest work, though, for he did brilliant work on manifolds in topology. His particular genius was to leap up and over a problem to present a solution from the top of the mountain looking down. While working in an analytical field, he came to his conclusions intuitively.
He finally discovered the opposite sex when he met a pretty dark haired LPN, Eleanor Stier, when he was admitted to the hospital for minor leg surgery. He spent a lot of time with her, but was still emotionally disconnected, and when at twenty-five, John David Stier was born to them, he did not propose marriage or offer financial help. When Eleanor lost her living quarters and her part-time job, she had to put the child in foster care so she could return to a full time job.
During this three-year period, while still involved with Eleanor, he met Alicia, another pretty, dark haired girl from South America who was attending MIT as physics major. She worshiped him and eagerly went out of her way to meet him and gain his attention. She eventually won, and when Eleanor came over one night to see him, she found out about Alicia and became upset and subsequently contacted his father, who urged John to marry her because of the boy. But friends urged him not to because of an attitude that Eleanor wasn’t in his mental class and Alicia was. He and Alicia were married in 1956, honeymooned in Europe, and in 1958 John Charles Martin Nash was born.
The intervening years were spent productively, with John working on his mathematical challenges, dividing his time between seminars and studying at Courant in New York, MIT and Princeton. It was during this time period too, that he suffered some emotional blows, his father died and he did not win the coveted Fields Medal. He had also not attained a full professorship at Princeton, and felt that he had made a mistake by not having gone to Harvard when he had the chance. The stresses of career striving, fatherhood, parental loss and his high strung mental composition pulled him apart and when he was thirty he began to seem stranger than ever to the people surrounding him.
His personality changed and he grew his hair long and made comments to people that alarmed them. The book emphasizes his belief that aliens were communicating with him. One morning he walked into a room filled with university faculty with an edition of The New York Times under his arm. He announced that extraterrestrials from another galaxy were communicating with him through an article on the front page of The Times written in alien code only he could interpret. He often remarked that aliens had ruined his life, because he interpreted their messages to mean that he should work for world peace at the United Nations. He became obsessed with politics and his peace mission. He wrote letters to government officials and the United Nations about his desire to work for world peace. Then he began to notice strange men following him and odd things happening to him.
Alicia found him too difficult to deal with because he at times became despondent and she worried that he would become suicidal. She was working as an engineer and now the sole support of the family. His outbursts and awkward social behavior led her to finally institutionalize him in a Boston sanitarium. He was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic and after chemical therapy and psychotherapy, released several months later.
Alicia and John decided to take a vacation to Europe, she hoping that his being in a new environment would help him forget and begin anew. But he had become convinced that he must get away from the United States and sought political refugee status in East Germany, France and Switzerland. Curiously, the United States State Department prevailed upon those countries to disallow him refugee status and made every effort on Alicia’s behalf to thwart him and forcibly bring him back home.
She divorced him a few years later and he spent over thirty years wandering around the Princeton campus, popping in and out of classrooms disrupting lectures, wandering through the halls and the library. The students referred to him as The Phantom of Fine Hall. During these years he was hospitalized several times, and although divorced, lived with Alicia out of financial necessity. His friends and former teachers at Princeton felt for him and admired his prior achievements. They were as supportive as possible, finding grants for him, even arranging teaching jobs which he refused and which they hoped would bring him back to their world.
Left alone and forgotten about, he became involved with computers and spent hours in the library working out his ideas. Perhaps the lack of human competitive, abrasive interaction and the fulfilling acceptance of the computer worked the wonder that medicine and therapy could not and he returned to revolve once again in the human orbit.
Meanwhile, his Equilibrium Theory was being taught in university courses throughout the world and had become an accepted part of the entire Game Theory curriculum. No one knew who John Nash was or whether he was even alive. But he had friends who thought he had been terribly neglected and helped bring his work to the attention of the Swedish Nobel Committee. After protracted deliberation and intense opposition by one member, they voted him a shared Nobel award in economics along with two other men in 1994.
Everyone was extremely nervous at the thought of what he might do. The award ceremony was part of a prestigious celebration of cocktail parties and dinners. He would be expected to give a seminar, write a short Nobel autobiography and be presented to the King of Sweden when he accepted his award. They held their breath and his behavior was exemplary.
In his Nobel biography he refers to his prior mental difficulties and resolves that he will no longer attempt to ponder any political solutions, since in the present day world there is no realistic hope of any kind of a positive political resolution and is therefore a waste of time. This is seen by most as his admission to his prior mental problems. I, personally, wonder if he isn't just telling his peers what they want to hear. You, know, Galileo and his famous "But it moves anyway," when forced to renounce his theory that the earth revolves around the sun at the Inquisition.
His contemporaries were Norbert Weiner, Wiggens, Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, and John Von Neumann. Alfred Nobel established the Nobel Peace Prize after he developed the formula to stabilize nitroglycerine and invented dynamite which could then be used in weapons of war. He thought he had invented an explosive which would end war because it would be too terrible to use. He realized his mistake but somehow Einstein, Oppenheimer and Von Neumann for all their brilliance didn’t and persuaded the United States government to begin work on developing the atom bomb. The atom bomb didn’t bring peace, either, eventuating in Edward Teller's hydrogen bomb. Notably, Nash was an advocate for peace and his equilibrium theory, which depends upon bargaining strategy, might be the strongest weapon of all.
One could note that walking barefoot with shoulder length hair on the Malibu Beach does not seem strange, but on the campus of Princeton it does. One could also note that men who roamed through the Middle Eastern deserts communing with gods and angels are now worshiped by millions, but claiming to understand extragalactic alien communications in America, again, is a reason to be certified “not all there.” One could also note that to be “all here” in this world is not the yellow brick road that the world’s administrators would like to lead us down.
Sylvia has done an excellent job of writing in this book. She has researched in depth and conducted personal interviews, providing quotes and snippets of information from people who knew him as a young genius at Princeton. She has been objective about him, not hiding certain aspects of his life, yet her portrayal is, overall, sympathetic.
It takes a strong mind to survive on this planet.
Recommended:
Yes
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Stloraine
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Location: Star Town, Milky Way Galaxy
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Writer, pianist, mystic. Pisces. Love to see movies, swim, study paleontology, astronomy and ancient history.
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