Book Note: A Beautiful Mind By Sylvia Nasar
I am tempted to say this book is better than the movie. But I haven’t seen the movie, and probably never will. I don’t watch many movies anymore because they take time away from reading excellent books like this one.
I am partial to books about scientists, partly because a biography about a scientist introduces me to two things at once: the scientist himself and the concepts the scientist discovered. A double education. In the case of John Nash, I knew nothing about his work and a scant amount about the man, whose existence I gleaned from trailers of the 2001 movie, and so this biography was an introduction to both.
A Beautiful Mind is two separate books. The first book tells about the childhood and achievements of John Nash, and the second is about his battle with schizophrenia. The books are relatively separate: Nash made his best discoveries, including the invention of the Nash Equilibrium, a concept that revolutionized economic theory, before the onset of his schizophrenia. After his first breakdown, his career remained on hold for over 30 years. The two stories — the mathematical life and this schizophrenic life — overlapped in places and tied up in interesting ways when he won the Nobel Prize in 1994, but for the most part, they were independent. What happened to Nash the schizophrenic could have happened to any schizophrenic, except that Nash was lucky in having colleagues in the academic community who so admired his previous work that they helped him get positions and maintain a social status that an ordinary schizophrenic could never hope for.
One of the most remarkable facts about Nash’s life is that when he won the Nobel Prize in economics, he was at Princeton University, but did not have a paid position there. He was, as the book puts it, something of a “ghost,” a former employee who was allowed to haunt the halls of Princeton because the senior math faculty there understood the value of what he had done before the age of thirty. I don’t imagine many Noble laureates were unemployed when they won, but Nash was. He was at Princeton, just hanging out, living a shadow of his former life.
The book recounts a remarkable tragedy, in which one of the finest mathematical minds of the twentieth century was cut down at the height of his powers, but also a story of redemption, when the Nobel committee recognized the importance of this work and restored him late in life to the firmament.
The only fault I find with the book is that Nasar does not thoroughly explain Nash’s achievements. Understandably, the accomplishments of a world-class mathematician will be quite arcane. But I would have appreciated better explanations. Nash’s work in the field of topology was especially challenging to appreciate. But from this book I gained a new appreciation for schizophrenia and the devastation it causes, and about what life was like for people with schizophrenia before the days of modern antipsychotics. For that alone, the book was a worthwhile read.
