A Beautiful Mind

“Nash had never in his life encountered anything like this exotic little mathematical hothouse. It would soon provide him with the emotional and intellectual context he so much needed to express himself.” 

Although intelligent, Nash was not a remarkable student at school. In part, this was due to the fact that he hated to follow the long, drawn-out methods that the teachers recommended. It is not until he reaches Princeton that he is given the freedom and inspiration to explore his own working methods and make his own discoveries.  

“By broadening the theory to include games that involved a mix of cooperation and competition, Nash succeeded in opening the door to applications of game theory to economics, political science, sociology, and, ultimately, evolutionary biology.” 

Prior to Nash’s work on the Nash Equilibrium, game theory was focused on overly simplistic games of “total conflict” that had few applications in the real world. Nash’s contributions expanded game theory so that it could actually be used to predict real-life behavior. It is this contribution that eventually wins him a Nobel Prize. 

“‘But I didn’t need you anymore,’ Nash kept saying, over and over.” 

“Fuck your Buddy,” the game Nash helps create, requires players to team up in order to progress with the game but to betray their teammates in order to win. When Nash betrays his partner in the penultimate round, the man loses his temper but Nash, self-interested and self-serving, simply cannot understand why he is upset.  

“At times his ideas about the classroom had more to do with playing mind games than pedagogy.” 

Students sometimes complain about Nash’s teaching style, pointing out that he seems not to care whether the students actually learn anything from his rambling, convoluted lectures. He frequently uses unorthodox methods that seem to be more about keeping him entertained than actually passing on information. 

“For Nash to deviate from convention is not as shocking as you might think. They were all prima donnas. If a mathematician was mediocre, he had to toe the line and be conventional. If he was good, anything went.”

Fagi Levinson, the MIT mathematics “department’s den mother” (144) observes that many of the better mathematicians were quite eccentric in their clothing, ideas, and behavior. This point highlights the fact that the world of academia was accommodating of eccentricities, something which allowed Nash to employ his own idiosyncratic working methods and engage in strange behavior. 

“Nash suggested to Eleanor that she give John David up for adoption. He more or less told her openly that John David would be better off if she gave him up.” 

Nash is both self-serving and extremely jealous of his time, and he has little patience for anything that gets in the way of his research. This includes his own son. Although apparently happy that he has a child, Nash sees the baby as a distraction and burden and believes life will be easier if the boy is adopted. 

“But it was nonetheless decisive because for the first time he found not rejection but reciprocity. Thus it was the first real step out of his extreme emotional isolation.” 

Despite an early life characterized by a near-total lack of relationships, when he starts working at MIT, Nash discovers that he actually does have an emotional need for human connections. His first relationship with a man, although brief and secretive, is significant to him, helping him to move away from a life spent almost entirely in his own head.

“The experience of loving and being loved subtly altered Nash’s perception of himself and the possibilities open to him.” 

Nash’s relationship with Bricker is highly significant. It is the first time that he experiences a lasting relationship actually based on mutual love. It changes his outlook, paving the way for the possibility of other relationships and, eventually, marriage to Alicia. 

“‘She set her cap for him,’ Joyce recalled, ‘She had a campaign going.’” 

Alicia is dedicated and determined in her pursuit of Nash. First encountering him when she takes a class he is teaching, she is immediately drawn to his combination of good looks and vast intelligence. She sets out to study him and learn his interests, then adopts them as her own in order to catch his attention. 

“He saw her determination as a real key to her character, suggesting that she knew what she was getting and expected nothing more.” 

Although Nash realizes that he needs emotional support and human connections, he is reluctant to offer support in return. He is jealous of his time and dislikes distractions from his research. He sees Alicia’s single-minded pursuit of him as an indication that she will accept him as he is and not take up too much of his time and energy. 

“The things he did were mad but we didn’t really know it.” 

One reason that it takes some time for Nash to be treated for his schizophrenia is that the symptoms of his illness are remarkably similar to his usual eccentric behavior. Many of his associates initially believed that his condition was just his strange views and off-key humor or simply an obscure private joke.  

“All her attention was focused on a single task–not the task of giving birth, but that of saving John Nash.” 

Alicia’s dedication and determination are not limited to her efforts to catch Nash’s eye. After they are married and he falls ill, she is unwavering in her efforts to make sure that Nash’s genius is not lost beneath his confusion and delusions, making no effort to prepare for her new baby because she is too busy trying to save her husband. 

“Nash’s lifelong quest for meaning, control, and recognition in the context of a continuing struggle, not just in society, but in the warring impulses of his paradoxical self, was now reduced to a caricature.” 

Many of the symptoms of Nash’s illness are extreme versions of his existing character. When he develops schizophrenia, his obsession with rationality becomes twisted into an irrational search for meaning and messages that do not exist to anyone but him. 

“With dark hair to his shoulders, and a bushy black beard, he had a fixed expression, a dead gaze. Women, especially, found him frightening.” 

When Nash becomes ill, his increasingly strange physical appearance mirrors his declining mental health. By the time he has been in and out of mental hospitals several times, his appearance is so altered and so odd that he disturbs many of the people he encounters. 

“Yet this is how Nash–a man who craved, because of his nature and the nature of his illness, solitude and mobility–lived for the next six months, surrounded by strangers. If he had dreaded military service, what must this have been like for him?” 

Nash goes to great lengths to ensure that he is not drafted, knowing that the routines, rules, and regulations of military service would take away his freedom to explore his original thinking and unusual working methods. When he is treated at Trenton State Hospital, he has to face exactly these kinds of conditions, something that he finds acutely distressing. 

“For Nash, recovery of his everyday rational thought processes produced a sense of diminution and loss.” 

Although the people around Nash see his move away from delusional thinking as a positive event, Nash himself feels that he has lost access to the powerful insights into the world that his delusions had given him. 

“From the outset, however, Alicia drew the line at electroshock.”

Although desperate for Nash to recover, Alicia is reluctant to have Nash committed. When she eventually has no choice but to secure his treatment, she insists that he not undergo electroshock treatment, terrified that it would cause him to lose his memory and his mathematical prowess. 

“He believed that there were magic numbers, dangerous numbers. He was saving the world.” 

Nash’s obsession with patterns and secret messages reaches such a point that he begins seeing meanings where there are none. Fixated on numbers, he begins to connect then with prophesies and warnings, believing that numbers had extremely powerful and world-changing potential. 

“We all found the remarkable connections, level of detail, and breadth of knowledge […] exceptional.” 

Although nonsensical, the messages Nash leaves on the blackboards of Princeton are filled with incredible, if misdirected, insights. Nash’s great intelligence and capacity for original thought remains in evidence even if his ability to apply this rationally has gone.

“He was doing the arithmetic correctly but the reasoning for it was crazy.” 

Peter Cziffra, the head librarian of Fine Hall, saw many of the messages Nash wrote. At this point, Nash was interested in numerology and the basic 26 numerical system which he used to convert letters into numbers that he could use in equations that he believed would reveal secret meanings. 

“When Alicia offered to let Nash live with her in 1970, she was moved by pity, loyalty, and the realization that no one else on earth would take him in.” 

After yet another release from the mental hospital, Nash, distracted and dysfunctional, lives in an apartment with his mother. After she dies and his sister cannot cope with having him in her home, he is left with nowhere to go. It is a testament to Alicia’s love and patience that she allows him to move in with her in order to provide the support he needs. 

“He disappeared one day. When he came back he’d shaved his head and had become a born-again Christian.” 

After Nash’s symptoms enter remission and he appears to be well on the way to a full recovery from his schizophrenia, his second son tragically develops the same condition. The moment he runs away and becomes a religious fanatic, is the first indication that his mental health is declining. 

“Nash is the point of departure.” 

Economist Avinash Dixit observes that the Nash equilibrium is a central component of most economic applications of game theory. This makes Nash’s work key to a new generation of theorists who revolutionize economics in the 1980s and 1990s, leading to his eventual receipt of a Nobel Prize.