A Beautiful Mind

Sylvia Nasar

1/16/2004

John Forbes Nash, born in 1928, is a mathematical genius. By the time he was twenty he had already made significant contributions in mathematical theories, and by 1950 or so had produced a theory on non-cooperative gaming that has since affected economics on a world wide scale. Nash was a good looking man, egocentric, socially inept, and focused in his younger years. Yet inside him was a person looking for connections with other people as well as the mathematics that even now constantly drive him and his thinking.

After numerous relationships with men and women, and one out of wedlock son, Nash married a woman who had been a physics major at MIT where he was a professor. Alicia Nash didn't have an easy life with him from the beginning.

Unfortunately, while Alicia was pregnant with their son, Nash's illness manifested. He was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. For more than 25 years he was in and out of hospitals, trying to get to Europe and become a "world citizen", listening to voices that lead his life. Yet because of his genius, he was accepted in the mathematics world. He spent many of those 25 years hiding away at Princeton's mathematics department, supported by his now ex-wife.

Then the almost impossible happened. Nash got better. It is very rare for paranoid schizophrenics to spontaneously recover. Nash once again beat the curve. By the late 1980's he was once again lucid, no longer following the voices in his head, no longer delusional. In 1994 he received a Nobel Prize for Economics for his gaming theory.

In A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar recounts Nash' life story. She divides A Beautiful Mind into the three major stages of Nash' life. First Nasar gives the reader a picture of John Nash as the young, arrogant, egocentric genius. His excellence in school and college were phenonmenal. In the late 1940's and into the 1950's he was involved at some of the best institutions of the time for both mathematics and for involvement in the Cold War research. The story takes the twist into Nash' madness. Finally, Nasar tells about his life after illness. His personality is different. He still has the unfathomable genious mind and once again tackles complex mathematical problems and theories.

Nasar appears to give a good, objective description of Nash' life. She doesn't try to improve his personality when he was young. I could almost feel his arrogance personally. She describes the mental illness, but doesn't take the reader into the sensational details. Her final treatment of Nash is gentler, showing the man he now is. She doesn't appear to have aggrandized his story. A Beautiful Mind is a telling book of genius, illness, and recovery. If you've only seen the movie, you don't know John Nash. In fact, the movie twists away from the truth fairly quickly. The general facts are correct, but few of the details.

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