A Beautiful Mind, Sylvia Nasar (Simon & Schuster, 1998) ****

 

This marvelous biography of the mathematical genius and Nobel laureate John Nash won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.  It’s now back on the best-seller list and is the basis of the film with the same title, which most of you probably know has won eight Academy Awards nominations, including Best Picture.  The film’s pretty good but if you really want to get into this person’s life, read the book.  The author is a former New York Times economics correspondent and is currently the Knight Professor of Journalism at Columbia University.

 

John Nash was raised in Bluefield, West Virginia, a small town in the coal-mining region of that state.  He was somewhat of a social misfit from the beginning (what we’d call a nerd today) but his parents were supportive and his teachers eventually realized that John had a most unusual talent in mathematics.  He was awarded the PhD in 1950 from Princeton at the early age of 22 for his innovative but controversial thesis on non-cooperative game theory.

 

In spite of his eccentricities and social awkwardness, John eventually married one of his  MIT students, Alicia Larde, in 1957.  The following year, during the late stage of her pregnancy, John’s mental state became seriously unbalanced.  This led to a series of hospital confinements and treatments followed by temporary remissions, but his mental state continued its downward spiral into schizophrenia.  The series of personal catastrophes that accompanied his disease and his long road to recovery make up the remainder of his remarkable life story.  It’s a story that’s deep in places and often tragic, and may not be every reader’s cup of tea, but it will captivate you once you begin reading it.  And by the end of this book you will feel like you knew this man personally and lived through his ordeal with him.