A Beautiful Mind
Sylvia Nasar
WINNER, NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHY FINALIST, PULITZER PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY
Praise for A Beautiful Mind
“Two paragraphs and I was hooked!” — Oliver Sacks
“A brilliant book.” — David Herbert Donald
“Reads like a fine novel.” — David Goodstein, The New York Times
“Powerfully affecting … a three-handkerchief read.” — Charles C. Mann, The Wall Street Journal
“A triumph of intellectual biography.” — Robert Boynton, Newsday
“Might be compared to a Rembrandt portrait, filled with somber shadows and radiant light effects… simply a beautiful book.” — Marcia Bartusiak, The Boston Globe
“A remarkable look into the arcane world of mathematics and the tragedy of madness.” — Simon Singh, The New York Times Book Review
“A narrative of compelling power.” — John Allen Paulos, Los Angeles Times
“A wonderfully absorbing puzzle.” — Claire Douglas, Washington Post Book World
“A poetical love and coming-of-age story.” — Ted Anton, Chicago Tribune
“The stuff of classic tragedy.” — Robert A. Burton, San Jose Mercun News
“A powerful story brilliantly told.” — Will St. John, Detroit Free Press
“A worthy subject and a fascinating book.” — Craig Ryan, Portland Oregonian
“A page-turner.” — Claiborne Smith, Austin Chronicle
“An arresting portrait.” — June Kinoshita, St. Petersburg Times
“The parabolic arc of an American genius … superbly and thrillingly limned.” — Will Blythe, Mirabella
“A staggering feat of writing and reporting.” — Michael J. Mandel, BusinessWeek
“Profoundly sad yet redemptive.” — Worth Magazine
“Instead of facile theories, the reader enjoys wonder and astonishment.” — Richard Dooling, Salon
“Extraordinarily moving.” — Jeremy Bernstein, Commentary
“Absolutely fascinating.” — Jim Holt, Slate
“An engrossing, ultimately uplifting book.” — Gregg Sapp, Kirkus Reviews
“Will touch any reader who understands what it means to hope — or to fear.” — Booklist
“Unique.” — The Economist
“A compelling book about a phenomenal figure.” — Rov Porter, The Times
“Unblinking yet empathic.” — Daniel Kevles, Times Literan Supplement
“A romantic human story.” — Steven McCaffery, Irish News
“Genuinely compulsive.” — Jon Oberlander, Sunday Herald
“An astonishing achievement.” — Brian Rotman, London Review of Books
“A masterpiece of oral history.” — Karl Sigmund, Nature
“Be prepared for the birth of a new culture hero.” — Peter Wilhelm, Business Dav
“I defy anyone to read Sylvia Nasar’s prologue without being moved.” — Christopher Beauman, Broadway Ham & High
“A magnificent biography.” — Roy Weintraub, Journal of the History of Economic Thought
“High drama.” — Wade Roush, MIT Technology Review
“Deeply moving.” — Paul Trachtman, Smithsonian Magazine
“Presented with grace and skill.” — Brian Hayes, The Sciences
“A must-read with something for everyone.” — Keith Devlin, New Scientist
“Fascinating, complicated, and studious.” — Mark H. Fleisher, JAMA
“A deeply moving love story, an account of the centrality of human relationships.” — Richard Wyatt and Kay Jamison, The New England Journal of Medicine
“A gripping narrative.” — Kenneth Arrow, Nobel Laureate, The Times Higher Education Supplement
Simon & Schuster Paperbacks
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Copyright © 1998 by Sylvia Nasar
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art © 2001 by Universal Studios Publishing Rights, a Division of Universal Studios Licensing, Inc.
A Beautiful Mind is a trademark and copyright of Universal Studios.
All rights reserved.
First Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition July 2011
SIMON & SCHUSTER PAPERBACKS and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:
Nasar, Sylvia.
A beautiful mind : a biography of John Forbes Nash, Jr.,
winner of the Nobel Prize in economics, 1994/
Sylvia Nasar
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Nash, John F., 1928– . 2. Mathematicians —
United States — Biography I. Title
OA29.N25N37 1998
510’.92
[B]— DC21 98-2795
ISBN-13: 978-0-684-81906-8
ISBN-10: 0-684-81906-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-4516-2842-5 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-4391-2649-3 (ebook)
The author and publisher gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint material from the following works:
“The RAND Hymn,” words and music by Malvina Reynolds, © copyright 1961 by Schroeder Music Co. (ASCAP). Used by permission. All rights reserved. “John F. Nash Jr.” (Autobiographical Essay) and “The Work of John Nash in Game Theory” (Nobel Seminar), in Les Prix Nobel 1994 (Stockholm: Norstedts Tryckeri, 1995). Copyright © The Nobel Foundation, 1994. Excerpts from “Waking in the Blue” from Life Studies by Robert Lowell. Copyright © 1959 by Robert Lowell. Copyright renewed © 1987 by Harriet Lowell, Sheridan Lowell, and Caroline Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc. Excerpts from the letters of Robert Lowell reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Robert Lowell.
FOR ALICIA ESTHER LARDE NASH
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
— WILLIAM WORDSWORTH,
“Intimations of Immortality”
Contents
Foreword
Prologue
Part One: A Beautiful Mind
1: Bluefield (1928–45)
2: Carnegie Institute of Technology (June 1945–1948)
3: The Center of the Universe (Princeton, Fall 1948)
4: School of Genius (Princeton, Fall 1948)
5: Genius (Princeton, 1948–49)
6: Games (Princeton, Spring 1949)
7: John von Neumann (Princeton, 1948–49)
8: The Theory of Games
9: The Bargaining Problem (Princeton, Spring 1949)
10: Nash’s Rival Idea (Princeton, 1949–50)
11: Lloyd (Princeton, 1950)
12: The War of Wits (RAND,Summer 1950)
13: Game Theory at RAND
14: The Draft (Princeton, 1950–51)
15: A Beautiful Theorem (Princeton, 1950–51)
16: MIT
17: Bad Boys
18: Experiments (RAND, Summer 1952)
19: Reds (Spring 1953)
20: Geometry
Part Two: Separate Lives
21: Singularity
22: A Special Friendship (Santa Monica, Summer 1952)
23: Eleanor
24: Jack
25: The Arrest (RAND, Summer 1954)
26: Alicia
>
27: The Courtship
28: Seattle (Summer 1956)
29: Death and Marriage (1956–57)
Part Three: A Slow Fire Burning
30: Olden Lane and Washington Square (1956–57)
31: The Bomb Factory
32: Secrets (Summer 1958)
33: Schemes (Fall 1958)
34: The Emperor of Antarctica
35: In the Eye of the Storm (Spring 1959)
36: Day Breaks in Bowditch Hall (McLean Hospital, April–May 1959)
37: Mad Hatter’s Teas (May–June 1959)
Part Four: The Lost Years
38: Citoyen du Monde (Paris and Geneva, 1959–60)
39: Absolute Zero (Princeton, 1960)
40: Tower of Silence (Trenton State Hospital, 1961)
41: An Interlude of Enforced Rationality (July 1961–April 1963)
42: The “Blowing-Up” Problem (Princeton and Carrier Clinic, 1963–65)
43: Solitude (Boston, 1965–67)
44: A Man All Alone in a Strange World (Roanoke, 1967–70)
45: Phantom of Fine Hall (Princeton, 1970s)
46: A Quiet Life (Princeton, 1970–90)
Part Five: The Most Worthy
47: Remission
48: The Prize
49: The Greatest Auction Ever (Washington, D.C., December 1994)
50: Reawakening (Princeton, 1995–97)
Epilogue
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
Foreword
(Adapted from remarks at John Nash’s 80th birthday Festschrift)
IN JUNE 2006, I went to St. Petersburg to track down the forty-year-old mathematician who had solved the Poincaré Conjecture. Reputedly a hermit with wild hair and long nails who lived in the woods on mushrooms, he was up for a Fields Medal and a $1 million cash prize but had gone into hiding, not just from the media but from the math community. Meanwhile, some folks in Beijing were claiming that they’d beaten him to the punch. It was a great story — if only we could find him.
After four frustrating days in Russia, my colleague and I hadn’t found a soul who had seen or talked to the guy or his family in years. Then, when we had pretty much thrown in the towel, we stumbled on his mother’s apartment more or less by accident and, voilà, there was the “hermit,” dressed in a sports jacket and Italian loafers, evidently having lunch and watching soccer on TV.
He gestured for us to sit down and explain what we wanted.
“My name is Sylvia Nasar,” I began. “I’m a journalist from New York and I’m working on …”
He interrupted: “You’re a writer?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t read the book,” he said, “but I saw the movie with Russell Crowe.”
The point is that, no matter where in the world you are, you’d have to be a real hermit not to know the inspiring story of John Nash.
There are lots of stories about the rise and fall of remarkable individuals. But there are very few stories, much less true stories, with a genuine third act. Nash’s story had — has — such a third act. Act III of Nash’s life story is his miraculous reawakening.
It is that third act that makes Nash’s story resonate with people all over the world — most especially with those who suffer from devastating mental illnesses or love someone who does.
At one point in the movie, when it looks as if things were all over for Nash, his wife, Alicia, takes John’s hand, places it over her heart, and says, “I have to believe that something extraordinary is possible.”
Something extraordinary was possible.
Of all the letters I’ve received from readers, my favorite came from a homeless man. It arrived in a dirty envelope with no return address, and it was scrawled on neon orange paper. It was signed “Berkeley Baby.” It would never have made it past the New York Times mailroom after the anthrax scare.
The letter writer turned out to have been the night rewrite editor on the metro desk at the New York Times before he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the mid-1970s. Since then, he had adopted the name Berkeley Baby and lived on the streets of Berkeley, California, near the university, a forlorn, sad figure not unlike the Phantom of Fine Hall.
He wrote, “John Nash’s story gives me hope that one day the world will come back to me too.”
The world came back to John Nash after more than thirty years, and it was the third act of his life that drew me to his story in the first place. In the early 1990s, I was an economics reporter at the New York Times. I was interviewing a Princeton professor about some trade statistics when he mentioned a rumor that a “crazy mathematician” who hung around the math building might be on the short list for a Nobel prize in economics. “You don’t mean the Nash of the Nash equilibrium?” I asked. He told me to call a couple of people in the math department to learn more. By the time I put down the phone, I realized that this was a fairy tale, Greek myth, and Shakespearean tragedy rolled into one.
I didn’t write the story immediately. Lots of people wind up on short lists for the Nobel and never win, so writing about him in a newspaper would have been an invasion of privacy. In any case, someone else got the prize in 1993. The next year, however, I saw Nash’s name in the Nobel announcement. I ran over to my editor to pitch the story and actually made him cry.
It was a difficult story to get. Nobody who knew any facts was willing to go on the record or even talk to me. Martha Legg, Nash’s sister, finally broke the silence about the nature of the illness that had wrecked his life.
Lloyd Shapley, another pioneer of game theory, described Nash as a graduate student in the late 1940s, when he wrote his seminal papers on game theory: “He was immature, he was obnoxious, he was a brat. What redeemed him was a keen, logical, beautiful mind.
So now you know to whom I owe the title of the biography.
Because Nash’s story is so familiar, I’d like to share some of the less familiar parts, including how the book came to be and some of the things that happened after the book and movie broke off.
In June 1995, I found myself in Jerusalem. By then, I had written a book proposal, gotten a publisher, and was about to spend a year at the Institute for Advanced Study. Unfortunately, I’d never met my subject or exchanged more than a few words with him on the phone. When I found out that Nash was going to a game theory conference in Jerusalem, I thought I’d go too.
Some will remember what Nash said about John von Neumann, who had given him some of the worst advice ever given to a doctoral student. Fortunately, Nash had ignored von Neumann’s advice. Unfortunately for me, he had also decided to ignore the advice of many of his friends and supporters to cooperate with his biographer.
“Dear Mrs. Nasar,” a typical note began. “I have decided to take a position of Swiss neutrality …”
Everyone knows the phrase “It takes a village.” It had taken someone weeks of dogged reporting to put together a six-line CV and a short list of Nash’s publications. It took hundreds of sources to piece together his whole story. No single individual, not even Alicia or his sons, knew the whole story.
It turned out to be possible to stitch together thousands of bits and pieces — gathered from hundreds of interviews, dozens of letters, and a smattering of documents — into a narrative. It worked partly because the mathematics community is like a Greek chorus — watching, commenting, remembering, filling in the background, explaining the action.
But ultimately it worked because John Nash was always a star and, all his life, people around him couldn’t take their eyes off him, couldn’t stop thinking about him. How many of us, years from now, will live as brightly in the memories as he has for so long … and long before the fairy tale ending.
And, of course, it worked because Alicia never stopped believing that something extraordinary is possible. She wanted his story told because she thought it would be inspiring for people with mental illnesses.
A friend once asked Na
sh where Alicia was. John answered “Having dinner with Sylvia.” After a pause, he added, “I hope they aren’t talking about me.”
Actually, Alicia was extremely protective of Nash’s privacy and incredibly discreet. There was only one exception: we were in the basement of her bank, sifting through the contents of her safety deposit box looking for photos. She came across these little 2 x 2 snapshots of her and John with Felix Browder at the UC Berkeley swimming pool. That was the beefcake shot that convinced Graydon Carter not to kill the book excerpt in Vanity Fair. (Brian Grazer told me he’d bought the rights to the book because Graydon told him to.)
Alicia was holding the picture and chuckling: “Doesn’t he have the greatest legs?!”
Nash never did agree to give me an interview for the book.
Post-publication meetings between biographers and their living subjects, authorized or not, often take place in lawyers’ offices. Ours did not.
Instead, we met at a Broadway play, Amy’s View, starring Judi Dench. Nash told us that it was his first Broadway play. He and Alicia liked Proof better. I was sitting behind them and could see their shoulders shaking with laughter. David Auburn, the playwright of Proof, told me that he got the idea of turning the sisters into daughters of a mad mathematician from John’s story.
Watching someone get his life back is an incredibly sweet experience — even little things like driving again or having coffee at Starbucks. When I asked Nash, for a New York Times story about Nobel prize winners and how they spent their prize money, how the prize had affected his life, he said, well, now he could buy a $2 cup of coffee at Starbucks. “Poor people can’t do that,” he’d observed.
