Jun 15, 2010 10:32 AM
4019 Views
A Beautiful Mind is the biography of John Nash, the mathematical genius whose work on game theory provided a new basis for modern mathematical economics. At the age of thirty-one he suffered a mental breakdown and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. If you haven't yet seen the film then I would recommend you read the reviews here by sandrabarber and lookaroundcafe2, which eloquently summarise my own opinion on this movie. The book lifts the lid on the true story of the man, stripping away the romanticized Hollywood treatment, and the person described here could not be more different to the character
played by Russell Crowe.
Biographer Sylvia Nasar, a former economics correspondent for The New York Times, has recounted his life
in chronological order. As a boy he was socially awkward, introverted, lacked friends and withdrew into his own world. His handwriting was atrocious and his teachers labeled him an underachiever. At nine years old his worst subjects were maths and music - but his best friends were books, of which there was a plentiful supply at both his parents' and parents' houses. His gift for maths began to manifest itself in his unorthodox approach - he threw out the rule books and always looked for different ways to do things. As a young adolescent he gained immense satisfaction from devising mathematical proofs which were elegant and brief, compared to the lengthy methods his teachers employed. Nash's teenage years were not easy due to non existent-social skills, and his peers found him weird. John's pastimes included torturing animals and rigging up sophisticated circuits to deliver electric shocks to unsuspecting children.
At the age of 15, Nash and a couple of neighbouring boys started fooling around with homemade explosives. This all came to a tragic end when one of them, experimenting alone, had a pipe bomb explode in his lap, severing his intestinal artery and causing him to bleed to death. Strangely, the author makes no more
mention of this incident, and I was left wanting to know of the impact this had on the young John. Anyone who watched the excellent programme on Paul Gascoine recently will have learnt how a traumatic episode in
adolescence can trigger mental illness. Although Nasar tries to provide other reasons later on in the book for his mental collapse, the glossing over of this incident is a major flaw.
At College, Nash's originality in maths continued to shine, but fellow students sensed he had a mental problem. Only his size saved him from having the crap beaten out of him. The other guys, afraid of his strength, chose instead to ostracise him. John exposed himself(see below!) to further ridicule when he became attracted to other boys, and his popularity continued to plunge due to his displays of contempt for anyone he considered to be his intellectual inferior - which took care of everyone. But as his reputation for being a genius grew, he did attract a following of sorts, especially amongst those who came to him for help with homework.
Photographs of Nash in the book certainly back up one student's description of him being'handsome as a god', and I would have cast Brendan Fraser as him, if only he could act, since the resemblance is uncanny. But his personality was deeply unattractive. Frankly, he was an obnoxious, arrogant git who wanted to establish that he was smarter than anyone else, and who was always ready with an insensitive put-down. Oh, and a racist and anti-semite too. What cannot be disputed is the extraordinary way John acquired knowledge. Nobody remembers seeing him with a book during his graduate career, he rarely attended classes, his handwriting was now almost unreadable with misspellings as a result of dyslexia, and he had to have lined notepaper. But he learned through conversations and by attending visiting lecturers. And he did spend an awfully long time just thinking, which is key to solving any maths problem.
At the age of twenty, Nash began his studies at Princeton, where he rubbed shoulders with scientific legends Einstein and John von Neumann, the man considered by many to be the most brilliant mind of the twentieth
century. Nasar provides an informative account on the history of maths and physics around this time, and it is easy to see how Princeton had become a hothouse for mathematics at the time of Nash's arrival.
Nasar paints an illuminating picture of the surroundings and lecturers of Princeton, reminding me strangely enough of Hogwarts and its inhabitants. For example, Steenrod, whose lectures were'exciting but 90 percent wrong', and the constant stream of board games such as chess, go and Kriegspiel, played with alarming competitiveness and aggression in the common room. John's interest in games led him to request an audience with Von Neumann, the father of Game Theory, and a clash of heads created the competitive edge which spurred the younger man on, at the age of twenty-one, to produce his thesis which became known as the'Nash Equilibrium Theory'. Its significance on economic, social science and biological theory wasn't recognized at the
time, even by Nash.
Nash's growing reputation as a genius saw him recruited by the secretive(research and development) Corporation in Santa Monica in 1950. Here he was privy to secrets at the height of the Cold War, the Korean War and the era of McCarthyism. Nasar skillfully evokes the fear of ordinary Americans during this period, and the atmosphere of paranoia could only have helped to unsettle John's already fragile mind. Whilst her attention to detail is impressive, she commits a glaring error by placing Bletchley Park, the place where Alan Turing and his team broke the Nazi code'on England's southern coast'. As any fule kno, the old que
en was beavering away in Milton Keynes, hardly a seaside resort. John put elaborate plans into action to make sure he avoided the draft for the Korean War. It wasn't that he was a pacifist, but his personality
found the notion of regimentation and close contact with strangers highly threatening. His efforts eventually reached delusional proportions when he carried on avoiding conscription long after the war, and the draft, had ended.
Nash, however, partly blamed the onset of his illness on the stress of teaching. He started
teaching, aged twenty-three, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology(MIT) where, by today's standards he would easily have failed any classroom observation. His teaching methods amounted to malpractice, and putting classic unsolved problems on exams was a favourite trick. Whilst not wishing to support this methodology, I do admire his explanation of "Maybe, if people didn't realize that the problem was'hard', they could solve it". Undergraduates voted with their feet, however, and his class size dropped from thirty to five
students. Nash continued to display his genius in research and produced some truly inspired work(on manifolds in topology, but I don't expect you to understand that dear reader!).
At the age of twenty-four he finally found a girlfriend in Eleanor Stier, a nurse, but kept her a secret whilst simultaneously flaunting at least three affairs with other men.
