A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash
**Also an Academy Award–winning film starring Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly—directed by Ron Howard**
The powerful, dramatic biography of math genius John Nash, who overcame serious mental illness and schizophrenia to win the Nobel Prize.
“How could you, a mathematician, believe that extraterrestrials were sending you messages?” the visitor from Harvard asked the West Virginian with the movie-star looks and Olympian manner. “Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did,” came the answer. “So I took them seriously.”
Thus begins the true story of John Nash, the mathematical genius who was a legend by age thirty when he slipped into madness, and who—thanks to the selflessness of a beautiful woman and the loyalty of the mathematics community—emerged after decades of ghostlike existence to win a Nobel Prize for triggering the game theory revolution. The inspiration for an Academy Award–winning movie, Sylvia Nasar’s now-classic biography is a drama about the mystery of the human mind, triumph over adversity, and the healing power of love.
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A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash
**Also an Academy Award–winning film starring Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly—directed by Ron Howard**
The powerful, dramatic biography of math genius John Nash, who overcame serious mental illness and schizophrenia to win the Nobel Prize.
“How could you, a mathematician, believe that extraterrestrials were sending you messages?” the visitor from Harvard asked the West Virginian with the movie-star looks and Olympian manner. “Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did,” came the answer. “So I took them seriously.”
Thus begins the true story of John Nash, the mathematical genius who was a legend by age thirty when he slipped into madness, and who—thanks to the selflessness of a beautiful woman and the loyalty of the mathematics community—emerged after decades of ghostlike existence to win a Nobel Prize for triggering the game theory revolution. The inspiration for an Academy Award–winning movie, Sylvia Nasar’s now-classic biography is a drama about the mystery of the human mind, triumph over adversity, and the healing power of love.
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A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash
**Also an Academy Award–winning film starring Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly—directed by Ron Howard**
The powerful, dramatic biography of math genius John Nash, who overcame serious mental illness and schizophrenia to win the Nobel Prize.
“How could you, a mathematician, believe that extraterrestrials were sending you messages?” the visitor from Harvard asked the West Virginian with the movie-star looks and Olympian manner. “Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did,” came the answer. “So I took them seriously.”
Thus begins the true story of John Nash, the mathematical genius who was a legend by age thirty when he slipped into madness, and who—thanks to the selflessness of a beautiful woman and the loyalty of the mathematics community—emerged after decades of ghostlike existence to win a Nobel Prize for triggering the game theory revolution. The inspiration for an Academy Award–winning movie, Sylvia Nasar’s now-classic biography is a drama about the mystery of the human mind, triumph over adversity, and the healing power of love.
Sylvia Nasar is the author of the bestselling A Beautiful Mind, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. She is the John S. and James. L Knight Professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
Read an Excerpt
John Forbes Nash, Jr. mathematical genius, inventor of a theory of rational behavior, visionary of the thinking machine had been sitting with his visitor, also a mathematician, for nearly half an hour. It was late on a weekday afternoon in the spring of 1959, and, though it was only May, uncomfortably warm. Nash was slumped in an armchair in one corner of the hospital lounge, carelessly dressed in a nylon shirt that hung limply over his unbelted trousers. His powerful frame was slack as a rag doll's, his finely molded features expressionless. He had been staring dully at a spot immediately in front of the left foot of Harvard professor George Mackey, hardly moving except to brush his long dark hair away from his forehead in a fitful, repetitive motion. His visitor sat upright, oppressed by the silence, acutely conscious that the doors to the room were locked. Mackey finally could contain himself no longer. His voice was slightly querulous, but he strained to be gentle. "How could you," began Mackey, "how could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof...how could you believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world? How could you...?"
Nash looked up at last and fixed Mackey with an unblinking stare as cool and dispassionate as that of any bird or snake. "Because," Nash said slowly in his soft, reasonable southern drawl, as if talking to himself, "the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously."
The young genius from Bluefield, West Virginia handsome, arrogant, and highly eccentric burst onto the mathematical scene in 1948. Over the next decade, a decade as notable for its supreme faith in human rationality as for its dark anxieties about mankind's survival, Nash proved himself, in the words of the eminent geometer Mikhail Gromov, "the most remarkable mathematician of the second half of the century." Games of strategy, economic rivalry, computer architecture, the shape of the universe, the geometry of imaginary spaces, the mystery of prime numbers all engaged his wide-ranging imagination. His ideas were of the deep and wholly unanticipated kind that pushes scientific thinking in new directions.
Contents Prologue Part One: A Beautiful Mind 1 Bluefield (1928-45) 2 Carnegie Institute of Technology (June 1945-June 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, 195O-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 Tea (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) Notes Select Bibliography Acknowledgments Index
Every once in a while there appears a book on science that mirrors the splendor of its subject. Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind is such a book -- an eloquent, heartbreaking, and heartwarming tale.
Oliver Sacks
A splendid book, deeply interesting and extraordinarily moving, remarkable for its sympathetic insights into both genius and schizophrenia.
David Herbert Donald
A brilliant book -- at once a powerful and moving biography of a great mathematical genius and an important contribution to American intellectual history.
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