Mathematician Nassar, Sylvia. A Beautiful

¶ … Mathematician Nassar, Sylvia. A Beautiful Mind. New York: Touchstone Books, 1998. The story of the 1994 Nobel-Prize winning mathematician and economist John Nash has proved to be an inspiration to all individuals who have heard and read about the great Princeton genius, and not simply because of Nash's ground breaking insights about the mathematics of game theory. Nash is equally famous for his return from his prison of mental illness. He is now once again dwelling in the lucid world of his previous, brilliant mind, in a state of sanity.

Author Sylvia Nassar's biography A Beautiful Mind tells the story of how Nash was born in the Ozarks, one of the poorest regions of America. As a young man, he was arrogant yet intellectually talented. After becoming a graduate student at Princeton, he even challenged Albert Einstein face-to face about the older man's theory of relativity. Einstein dismissed the young Nash's concerns from a mathematical point-of-view, but was impressed by Nash's bravado.

Nash became famous as a young man because of his unique insights into game theory, a theory that attempted to rationally predict how human beings made decisions with imperfect information, as people must in certain kinds of games, worldwide diplomacy, and economics. Ironically, although Nash's mathematical theories are used to predict human behavior with numbers and equations, even before he began to lose his reason, Nash had a great deal of difficulty relating to other people, even his fellow mathematicians.

One of the reasons Nash loved mathematics was that he did not need to deal with other people's emotions in a world of numbers. According to Nassar's book, even before he developed the symptoms of schizophrenia, his contemporaries, "found him immensely strange," and "aloof." (Nassar, p.

13) Even so, by the 1950s, Nash had carved a brilliant career "at the apex of the mathematics profession, traveled, lectured, taught," and met "the most famous mathematicians of his day." (Nassar, p.15) He had a wife and a young child by this time, and seemed to have a relatively stable if eccentric family and professional life.

Then, the man, after a bout of mania became "frozen in a dreamlike state." (Nassar, p.19) Nash was treated for his dissociated states into paranoid schizophrenia with insulin therapy, drugs, shock therapy, and talk therapy, none of which seemed to help his condition. His wife at first stood by him, and then divorced him. The great mathematical genius that enabled Nash to see patterns in behavior and numbers, and to construct predictable equations about human decision-making had dissolved into ravings about government agents, and nonsensical theorems.

After the failure of modern psychiatry and medicine to treat the mathematician, Nash became "a phantom who haunted Princeton in the 1970s and 80s, scribbling on the blackboards and studying religious texts." (Nassar, p.19) Yet, while Nash wandered aimlessly on the campus, this mathematician's former name, always great, suddenly "began to surface everywhere -- In economics textbooks, articles on evolutionary biology, political science treatises, mathematics journals," as his works, like that of all geniuses, became more rather.