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A Beautiful Mind: A Biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr., Winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, 1994 | 
 enlarge | Author: Sylvia Nasar
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Category: Book
Buy Used: $24.45
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Avg. Customer Rating:  282 reviews
Sales Rank: 1309974
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 459
ISBN: 0571197183
EAN: 9780571197187
ASIN: 0571197183
Publication Date: January 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Condition: wear to cover and outer edges, same or next day shipping
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Amazon.com
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
Product Description
In this dramatic and moving biography, Sylvia Nasar re-creates the life of a mathematical genius whose brilliant career was cut short by schizophrenia and who, after three decades of devastating mental illness, miraculously recovered and was honored with a Nobel Prize. A Beautiful Mind traces the meteoric rise of John Forbes Nash, Jr., from his lonely childhood in West Virginia to his student years at Princeton, where he encountered Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and a host of other mathematical luminaries. At twenty-one, the handsome, ambitious, eccentric graduate student invented what would become the most influential theory of rational human behavior in modern social science. Nash's contribution to game theory would ultimately revolutionize the field of economics. As a young professor at MIT, still in his twenties, Nash dazzled the mathematical world by solving a series of deep problems deemed "impossible" by other mathematicians. As unconventional in his private life as in his mathematics, Nash fathered a child with a woman he did not marry. At the height of the McCarthy era, he was expelled as a security risk from the supersecret RAND Corporation -- the Cold War think tank where he was a consultant. At thirty, Nash was poised to take his dreamed-of place in the pantheon of history's greatest mathematicians. His associates included the most renowned mathematicians and economists of the era: Norbert Wiener, John Milnor, Alexandre Grothendieck, Kenneth Arrow, Robert Solow, and Paul Samuelson. He married an exotic and beautiful MIT physics student, Alicia Larde. They had a son. Then Nash suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown. Nasar details Nash's harrowing descent into insanity -- his bizarre delusions that he was the Prince of Peace; his resignation from MIT, flight to Europe, and attempt to renounce his American citizenship; his repeated hospitalizations, from the storied McLean, where he came to know the poet Robert Lowell, to the crowded wards of a state hospital; his "enforced interludes of rationality" during which he was able to return briefly to mathematical research. Nash and his wife were divorced in 1963, but Alicia Nash continued to care for him and for their mathematically gifted son, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager. Saved from homelessness by his loyal ex-wife and protected by a handful of mathematical friends, Nash lived quietly in Princeton for many years, a dreamy, ghostlike figure who scrawled numerological messages on blackboards, all but forgotten by the outside world. His early achievements, however, fired the imagination of a new generation of scholars. At age sixty-six, twin miracles -- a spontaneous remission of his illness and the sudden decision of the Nobel Prize committee to honor his contributions to game theory -- restored the world to him. Nasar recounts the bitter behind-the-scenes battle in Stockholm over whether to grant the ultimate honor in science to a man thought to be "mad." She describes Nash's current ambition to pursue new mathematical breakthroughs and his efforts to be a loving father to his adult sons. Based on hundreds of interviews with Nash's family, friends, and colleagues and scores of letters and documents, A Beautiful Mind is a heartbreaking but inspiring story about the most remarkable mathematician of our time and his triumph over a tragic illness.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 277 more reviews...
 An Opinion of "A Beautiful Mind" from a fellow schizophrenic July 12, 2008
I read this book about two weeks ago, and I couldn't put it down. Maybe my opinion is biased because I have schizophrenia myself, but I found this story to be particularly encouraging in terms of my own recovery. The genius John Nash refused the coercive treatments of psychiatry and recovered naturally as some people do. I think it's sad that John could never reach the height of his mathematical genius again, after his illness, but it's still a hopeful story because he made a complete recovery, in my opinion. This book explains the mysterious and challenging symptoms of a misunderstood illness, and it also tells a tale of a person with the classic schizophrenic personality. It seems Nash was predisposed to the illness, and his behavior leading up to his first episode is characteristic of they typical schizophrenic. The difference between Nash's story and those of so many others with this difficult illness is that John was a true genius, became mad, and then recovered through sheer willpower. I think this book challenges the prevailing biopsychiatric model of schizophrenia and demonstrates that people can indeed recover without the use of toxic psychiatric drugs. You can also learn a lot about the politics of the Nobel Prize in this book.
A Beautiful Mind May 28, 2008
I saw the movie and loved it, BUT the book is much, much better. I am a physician and have treated patients with schizophrenia. This book is a must read.
Accurate, well-written and readable May 10, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I assisted Nash with the C programming language at Princeton and was a source for the book.
I found the book accurate, well-written, and readable. The part of the book that talks about the period in which Nash's economics prize was considered was indeed one in which this very private man was under a microscope, and my supervisor warned me to be very sensitive to his condition.
Sylvia Nasar knows her craft very well. The book is narratively organized, and she doesn't need to do dramatic flashbacks or grabbers to get you to keep turning the pages. It's a man's life, in America of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s...to the early nineties, by which time Nash had become the Phantom of Fine Hall.
But, Phantoms have a story too. Anyone interested in the human side of math and science, anyone interested in psychology, anyone who is impressed by women who both "stand by their man" and get a career of their own, will enjoy reading the story.
The book is much more detailed and far more accurate than the movie, which had to take liberties with the truth to be entertaining. It includes Nash's other common-law wife Eleanor and a son by that marriage, which was very different from Nash's relationship with Alicia.
The book is long but will probably be very rewarding for most readers.
 A mad genius April 22, 2008
John Forbes Nash Jr. is one of the most intriguing personalities I've known or read about. A precocious math genius and one of the few persons responsible for the establishment of game theory, he succumbed to mentally-decapacitating schizophrenia at around the age of 30. I think Sylvia Nasar succeeds wonderfully in recounting the personal aspect of Nash's life such as his various eccentricities and the effects his mental illness had on both himself and those around him, but when it comes to the science and theories the book is a wee bit disappointing. Of course this book is a biography and is therefore more concerned about his life than his work, but a lot of interesting examles could have been been used to more clearly illustrate Nash's theories that I was quite surprised Nasar didn't give at least a few of them. Until his theories are better understood, the enormity of Nash's genius could not be fully appreciated.
Recommended for its storytelling, but if you'd like to grab the gist of the technical stuff read his published papers or game theory textbooks.
POWER OF THE HUMAN MIND February 4, 2008
9 out of 9 found this review helpful
In Sylia Nasar's award-winning biography, A Beautiful Mind, which chronicles the life of mathematics genius and Nobel laureate John Nash, she divides his life into three acts (though the table of contents does not): genius, madness and reawakening. Act one, his genius phase, covers the first two parts of the book, and lasts for the first 29 years of his life. Act two - madness, which takes the form of schizophrenia - covers the next two parts, and lasts until he is 62. Act three, his awakening, covers his remission from schizophrenia, his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for Economics in 1994, and his life at Princeton up to the present. The book was made into an Oscar-winning motion picture by director Ron Howard in 2001 and stars Russell Crowe. Both book and film are phenomenal, as are the man's life and Crowe's portrayal of it.
Particularly interesting about act one of Nash's life, and part one of Nasar's book, is the discussion on game theory. Game theory, up until the time of Nash, was based upon the idea that only one player in a game can win and everyone else must lose. But Nash broke with tradition in his doctoral thesis by theorizing mathematically the results of a game in which everyone won, regardless of the number of players. His thesis became the basis of modern economic theory, and the reason for his eventual Nobel prize.
Nasar does an exceptional job explaining game theory and the workings of the mind of a genius, and especially Nash's original idea, which he called "the Nash equilibrium," and introduced in 1950 when he was only 21. Nash theorized that a game could be both competitive and cooperative - as opposed to the "winner take all" stakes of purely competitive games like chess - and could result in a desirable balance of power, rather than the undesirable condition of domination by a single power. In other words, when a player considers both his own good and the collective good of the other players, the results are better for everyone. This allowed gaming theory to be applicable to economics, politics and other sciences.
In Ron Howard's film, he illustrates this beautifully with the scene in the bar in which all the boys want the beautiful blonde who walks in. Russell Crowe's character, Nash, explains to his friends that if they all go for the blonde, they will all lose, because they will offend the blonde's friends, causing them all to strike out. But if each of them goes for a different girl, they will all score. This is the moment Nash realizes he has found the original idea for his doctoral thesis.
Socially, Nash had no friends growing up. This is ironic for a person whose greatest contribution to science was a theory of relationships. It is also interesting in that it illustrates something about the environment needed to develop into both a genius and a schizophrenic: isolation. As Nasar puts it, "His overriding interest was in patterns, not people." I don't think a lack of interest in people is required for genius, but I do believe an interest in patterns is. It was his ability to see patterns in numbers that led Nash into numerology and decoding imagined ciphers for the Pentagon.
Howard does an excellent job showing Nash's ability to recognize pattern in the opening scene when Russell Crowe insults a fellow student's tie after recognizing several patterns in it that are reflected in the layout of the punch table. He does it again when he is able to pick out the pattern of an umbrella in the stars for his love interest and future wife, Alicia, played by Jennifer Connelly. And when he is decoding for agent Parcher, played by Ed Harris, the patterns that he sees in the numbers and words "light up."
Until he meets Alicia, who would stand by him through his illness and help him overcome it, Nash's relationships are cloaked in mystery and innuendoes. It is not important to get into them here; but let me just say that the homosexual community was vocally disappointed by Howard's choice to leave them out of his film. I believe he was right to do so, if for no other reason than that they would have added nothing to the story; but more because no one is certain of what those relationships consisted. Nash himself did not consider himself a homosexual, so it may be that they were merely codependent. Regardless, they would undoubtedly have been immature and ego-centric, as all his personal relationship were before he met Alicia.
Alicia brought something to Nash's life that he had never experienced before: another focus besides himself and mathematics. Before her, his world revolved around the fact that he considered himself a mathematical genius. Now there was someone else to consider. Alicia drove a wedge into an otherwise self-focused, isolated life. She was the person that would recognize his slipping into schizophrenia - although she didn't know what it was at the time - and she was the one that would bring him back. Connelly is wonderful in the role of Alicia. Howard uses their relationship in the film to turn an otherwise straight thriller into a love story. It is this combination that makes A Beautiful Mind very much like a Hitchcock film; and yet, because it is true, it is even more interesting.
Ron Howard is masterful at blurring the line between what is real and what is not in Nash's world. We are never really sure until the day of the storm, when Alicia goes out to get the laundry off the line and discovers what is in the garage. That is an exciting scene, especially when combined with the scene of the baby's bath, and then with the scene following in which Parcher (Harris) holds a gun on Alicia and tells Nash that she is threatening the mission. The conclusion that Nash voices, as he tries to prevent Alicia from leaving, breaks the tension: "She never grows old" (talking about Charles' niece Marcee). That is when he shows he realizes that something is wrong in his world.
How he deals with his problem is what makes his "a beautiful mind." Once he is diagnosed with schizophrenia, he is given the usual drug and shock treatments. But he realizes that the treatments being administered to save his mind are also destroying it. With Alicia's consent and help, he tries to overcome his problem using the power of his own mind. It is because of her love and support, and the support of the mathematics community, that he succeeds.
There is a key scene in the movie - the scene when he receives the recognition of his colleagues in the faculty dining room in the "pen ceremony" - when Thomas King tells him about his being considered for the Nobel Prize. Nash explains to King how he overcame his schizophrenia. He says it is like having an appetite for something but, rather than feeding it, choosing to starve it. He said he had an appetite for certain things in his life that weren't real. They are still there - talking about Charles, Marcee and Parcher - but he doesn't acknowledge them. Thus, they no longer have the power to affect his life.
To me, this is the take-away from both Nasar's book and Howard's film. We all have appetites for things that are not healthy, not real - fantasies in which we play "what if" scenarios in our heads. Like Nash, we can choose to ignore them and go on to lead happy, healthy, productive lives. Or, as he did during his mad period, we can indulge and become involved with them, allowing them to affect and ultimately destroying us. Like Nash, we have power over our own thoughts, and, thereby, over our own lives. If we choose well, we, too, will have beautiful minds and beautiful lives. It's up to us.
Waitsel Smith
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