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A Beautiful Mind
The John Nash of Nasar's biography, while less likable, is far more fascinating and multidimensional than his cinematic counterpart; he is a draft dodger, a vicious prankster (one practical joke of Nash's involved filling a light fixture with water, which could have electrocuted a hapless victim when he turned on the light), and an arrogant braggart.
Hollywood has whitewashed much from Nash's life; besides working to dodge the Korean War draft out of fears that it would hurt his career, Nash fathered an illegitimate son whom he refused to help care for, despite the fact that his own circumstances were far better than those of the child's mother. The woman he married, Alicia Larde, is portrayed in the film as the one and only love of Nash's life; no mention is made of their 1963 divorce. (Nearly forty years later, the couple remarried.) To read Nasar's biography is to discover fascinating episodes like Nash's stint in Europe, when he attempted several times to renounce his American citizenship and obtain political asylum, and his encounters with fellow patient and Pulitzer prizewinning poet Robert Lowell in a Massachusetts mental hospital.
The book is as absorbing a history lesson as it is a story; Nasar sets Nash's life beautifully in the context of his time. Nash's bisexuality, for example, was much more of an issue then than it would be now; while today many areas have laws against discrimination based on sexual orientation, in 1954 not only was it legal for employers to dismiss a homosexual employee, but any evidence of homosexuality was sufficient grounds to deprive a government employee of security clearance. Later, the reader learns of many once-credited treatments for mental illness, like insulin injections (thought to deprive the brain of sugar and thus kill off defective brain cells), colonic irrigation, and even "fever therapy," given by inoculating patients with malaria or typhoid. Nasar's description of the politics by which Nobel prizes are awarded, a process purposely shrouded in mystery by the various committees involved, is a particularly fascinating read. Her inclusion of these and other details paints a rich historical picture that's a pleasure to read.
The one thing missing from A Beautiful Mind is, of course, the voice of John Nash himself. Where possible, Nasar plucked quotes from his writings and the recollections of friends and colleagues, but Nash himself maintained, as he put it to a New York Times reporter, "a position of Swiss neutrality" toward his biographer. Throughout the extraordinary story of Nash's life -- his rapid rise to fame, his loves, his illness, his disappearance for decades from the academic community, and his recognition at last as a Nobel laureate, one wants to ask him, "What were you thinking?" Unfortunately, it's a question Nasar was unable to answer.
One true merit of the movie, so highly altered from Nash's real story (and, considered apart from the facts, it is both moving and interesting), is that it will undoubtedly inspire many to pick up Nasar's beautifully written biography. It's time to meet the real John Nash.
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I saw the movie, and it got me wondering about the real John Forbes Nash, Jr. He's got a short (but interesting) online autobiography here, although he skips over his schizophrenic years and focuses on his academic work.
If it ain't broke, it doesn't have enough features yet.
Yeah the movie was too much of a "feel good" one for me to believe that it was all true. So I did some reading on the net about him and found out about how RAND fired him for suspected homosexuality, and his illegitimate son.
I also thought the movie portrayed him a little too "Forrest Gumpish" like he was retarded in some way but they never made any reference to it.
The bad thing thing was how the movie strung you along to believe that he was actually sane the whole time. Even the whole scene where Nash was being shot at while speeding along in the car. I know its hard to imagine, but it they made it seem real enough.
I guess when you question how a scizophrenic person can imagine such strange things and believe them, I think about when humans dream. How many strange dreams have you had that were totally unbelievable yet you didn't question them in the dream? A person with this disorder just has part of their dreams occurring during the day while awake.
I guess if they told the real story of John Nash, you'd not like him as much, and Russle Crowe wouldn't be getting so many accolades for this movie if he portrayed John Nash as a bisexual, draft dodging, dead-beat dad.
His presentations were pretty much always like that, even before the schizophrenia. He was a terrible speaker, disorganized and unclear, who gave the impression of babbling nonsense off the top of his head. He was also a terrible teacher, who bored his students out of their skulls. His presentations always made other mathematicians skeptical that he was actually generating any valid ideas at all -- until he managed to get them down on paper, and proved himself a genius.
So I'm not sure that a bumbling presentation now is a sign that "his mind has gone".
I'm about half way through the book.
Von Neuman plays a role in the book.
Von Neuman invented the min-max algorithm which
is widely used in artificial intelligence game
playing programs such as chess. Nash's equilibrium
point is supposed to be a powerful generalisation
on min-max, but I don't see it often used in A.I. programs.
Also in the book Von Neuman flips off Nash as being a pompous grad student.
Nash gets the final laugh when he WINS the Nobel prize
and Von Neuman doesn't.
The founders of Artificial Intelligence John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky
were classmates of Nash and have cameos in the book.
Later in his career Nash becomes something of
a computer hacker, but I haven't reached that part of
the book yet.
Both the book and movie are rare lterary depictions of grad school life.
They capture the stresses of science/engineering nerds.
Also things have changed since the 1950s and now,
but not as much as you'd think.
The Fresh Air program segment with the interview with Sylvia Nasar is here (RealAudio).
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
The Nash Equilibrium is a very strange beast. It's a solution to the non-zero-sum game corresponding generally to a solution to the zero-sum game, but nastier. Interestingly, a number of the workers in Game Theory, in ESS Theory, and more generally in sociobiology have had similar mental illnesses. I suspect it has something to do with the nature of the problems game theorists like to work on.
I don't know if the author of the book got this confusion, but it doesn't help to promulgate it.
Sociopathy (nowadays usually called Antisocial Personality Disorder, which I think is too euphemistic) and schizophrenia are completely different things. Schizophrenia is a thought disorder, diagnosed on Axis I. Sociopathy is a personality disorder, diagnosed on Axis II.
Sociopathy doesn't seem to be related to genius at all, except that sociopaths tend to be pretty intelligent. Schizophrenia, or at least schizoaffective disorder, and manic depression (which often has schizoaffective features in manic and mixed states), on the other hand, do appear to be related to genius.
I would go so far as to say that the cluster B personality disorders, of which sociopathy is one, aren't mental illnesses at all, but rather styles of dealing with others. It is certainly possible that someone could develop sociopathy as a result of being tormented for being schizophrenic, but it could happen for boatloads of other reasons as well.
After seeing the movie several weeks back(I thought it sucked), I found an old review of this book in the mathematics zine "Ferment." This review pretty much dismantles every shred of purported clueness in Sylvia Nasar's book.
t m# RH
http://www.maths.ex.ac.uk/~mwatkins/zeta/nash.h