A Beautiful Mind Read Free

action movie fan, that the pacing was fast.
    Third …
    “I think Russell Crowe looks a little like me.”
    Just in case you think Nash was kidding himself, at a Q&A with Ron Howard at New York University’s film school, some mathematicians from the Courant Institute came up to Ron Howard to tell him that John Nash actually had looked like Russell Crowe in the white T-shirt scene.
    The movie turned Nash into a celebrity. I was on a flight to Mumbai where I was meeting Amartya Sen, also a Nobel laureate in economics, at a game theory conference. The woman to my left had just asked me why I was going to India when the flight attendant came by with an Indian newspaper, and there was a photograph of John Nash, the keynote speaker, on the front page, right next to one of Sen. All I had to do was to point. In Mumbai, as in Beijing and other places he was invited to speak, he was mobbed by hundreds of reporters and well-wishers.
    Nash’s story appealed to children and teenagers who were thrilled by the notion that someone really young — and quirky — could accomplish amazing things and outsmart the older generation. And it made math seem cool.
Dear Mr. Nash,
     
Hi! I am 9 years old. My name is Ellie. I am a girl. I really admire you. You are my roll [ sic ] model for a lot of things. I think you are the smartest person who ever lived. I really wish to be like you. I would love to study math. The only problem with that is that I am not very good at math. I can do it. I like it. I am just not good at it. Was that what it was like for you when you were a kid? Please write back. Love, Ellie
     
P.S. I LOVE your name.
     
    — Sylvia Nasar

PART ONE
A Beautiful Mind
     

PART TWO
Separate Lives
     

21
Singularity
     
Nash was leading all these separate lives. Completely separate lives.
— A RTHUR M ATTUCK , 1997
     
    A LL THROUGH HIS CHILDHOOD , adolescence, and brilliant student career, Nash had seemed largely to live inside his own head, immune to the emotional forces that bind people together. His overriding interest was in patterns, not people, and his greatest need was making sense of the chaos within and without by employing, to the largest possible extent, the resources of his own powerful, fearless, fertile mind. His apparent lack of ordinary human needs was, if anything, a matter of pride and satisfaction to him, confirming his own uniqueness. He thought of himself as a rationalist, a free thinker, a sort of Spock of the starship
Enterprise.
But now, as he entered early adulthood, this unfettered persona was shown to be partly a fiction or at least partly superseded. In those first years at MIT, he discovered that he had some of the same wishes as others. The cerebral, playful, calculating, and episodic connections that had once sufficed no longer served. In five short years, between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-nine, Nash became emotionally involved with at least three other men. He acquired and then abandoned a secret mistress who bore his child. And he courted — or rather was courted by — a woman who became his wife.
    As these initial intimate connections multiplied and became ever-present elements in his consciousness, Nash’s formerly solitary but coherent existence became at once richer and more discontinuous, separate and parallel existences that reflected an emerging adult but a fragmented and contradictory self. The others on whom he now depended occupied different compartments of his life and often, for long periods, knew nothing of one another or of the nature of the others’ relation to Nash. Only Nash was in the know. His life resembled a play in which successive scenes are acted by only two characters. One character is in all of them while the second changes from scene to scene. The second character seems no longer to exist when he disappears from the boards.
    More than a decade later, when he was already ill, Nash himself provided a metaphor for his life during the MIT years, a metaphor that he