A Beautiful Mind

A Beautiful Mind tells the fascinating story of the mathematical genius, mental illness, and miraculous recovery and success of John Nash Jr.

Like many geniuses, John Nash had some eccentric and reclusive tendencies. But though his parents worried about him socially, he had a gift for thinking about math problems in new and unorthodox ways. Surprisingly, he didn’t show glowing grades in high school math because he would neglect to show his work and just write an answer that he had solved in his head. But in college, his professors were astounded by his methods for solving difficult math problems with ease, and he was accepted to graduate school at Princeton University.

Graduate students formed cliques under different mentoring professors, but Nash preferred to stay a loner, making him not particularly well-liked. But he found his place working under John Neumann, who fathered game theory.

Game theory is a way to explain human decision making among competing players through mathematical models. Nash expanded Neumann’s theory in his thesis to include games involving more than two players and allowing for cooperation. This crucial step in the development of the theory allowed it to relevant in real-world situations, particularly in economics. Most importantly, his additions to the theory allowed the possibility of mathematically determining human behavior with the possibility of mutual gain. This became known as the Nash equilibrium, which would win him the Nobel Prize, but not until half a century later.

His thesis gave him huge recognition in the mathematics field and landed him a job at MIT. It was there that he met his wife Alicia, and things were looking very promising for the young family.

When Nash approached the age of 30, he began to be increasingly anxious about not yet receiving tenure and a lack of new mathematical breakthroughs. His anxieties lead him to decide to take on Reimann’s hypothesis, a famously hard unsolved math problem. It was when he was putting all of his energy into this that he found out his wife was pregnant. This was when people noticed his increasingly strange behavior. Accusing his colleagues of looking through his trash to see his work on the hypothesis became common for Nash. He began to believe aliens were trying to ruin his career and they were sending secret messages through the paper. Turning down a professorship at the University of Chicago because he was “Emperor of Antarctica,” it was obvious that Nash was in deep. The tipping point for Alicia came when he went to Washington, DC, in the middle of the night to give letters to embassies explaining there was an imminent world government. She had him committed to a psychiatric hospital, where he…