A Beautiful Mind Read Free Page A

couched in his first language, the language of mathematics:
B
squared -I- RTF = 0, a “very personal” equation Nash included in a 1968 postcard that begins, “Dear Mattuck, Thinking that you will understand this concept better than most I wish to explain …” The equation represents a three-dimensional hyperspace, which has a singularity at the origin, in four-dimensional space. Nash is the singularity, the special point, and the other variables are people who affected him — in this instance, men with whom he had friendships or relationships. 1
    Inevitably, the accretion of significant relationships with others brings with it demands for integration — the necessity of having to choose. Nash had little desire to choose one emotional connection over another. By not choosing, he could avoid, or at least minimize, both dependence and demands. To satisfy his own emotional needs for connectedness meant he inevitably made others look to him to satisfy theirs. Yet while he was preoccupied with the effect of others on him, he mostly ignored — indeed, seemed unable to grasp — his effect on others. He had in fact no more sense of “the Other” than does a very young child. He wished the others to be satisfied with his genius —“I thought I was such a great mathematician,” he was to say ruefully, looking back at this period — and, of course, to some extent they were satisfied. But when people inevitably wanted or needed more he found the strains unbearable.

PART THREE
A Slow Fire Burning
     

PART FOUR
The Lost Years
     

PART FIVE
The Most Worthy
     

Epilogue
     
    T HE FESTIVE SCENE at the turn-of-the-century frame house opposite the train station might have been that of a golden wedding anniversary: the handsome older couple posing for pictures with family and friends, the basket of pale yellow roses, the 1950s photo of the bride and groom on display for the occasion.
    In fact, John and Alicia Nash were about to say “I do” for the second time, after a nearly forty-year gap in their marriage. For them it was yet another step — “a big step,” according to John — in piecing together lives cruelly shattered by schizophrenia. “The divorce shouldn’t have happened,” he told me. “We saw this as a kind of retraction of that.” Alicia said simply, “We thought it would be a good idea. After all, we’ve been together most of our lives.”
    After Mayor Carole Carson pronounced them man and wife, John was asked to kiss his bride again for the camera. “A second take?” he quipped. “Just like a movie.”
    A few moments before the ceremony Alicia’s cousin spoke to me about “the amazing metamorphosis” he had witnessed in John’s life since the Nobel. It’s not just the many other honors and speaking invitations from around the world that have followed, or the much wider audience that now appreciates the full range of exciting intellectual contributions made during his brief but brilliant career, or even the glamour of having his remarkable story told by Hollywood.
    At seventy-three, John looks and sounds wonderfully well. He feels increasingly certain that he won’t suffer a relapse. “It’s like a continous process rather than just waking up from a dream,” he told a
New York Times
reporter recently. “When I dream … it sometimes happens that I go back to the system of delusions that’s typical of how I was… and then I wake and then I’m rational again.” Growing self-confidence may be one reason that he is less embarrassed by talking about his past, and now speaks to groups that see his experience as “something that helps to reduce the stigma against people with mental illness.”
    For the first time since resigning from MIT in 1959, he now enjoys a modicum of personal security for himself and his family. Little things that the rest of us take for granted — having a driver’s license again, or getting a credit card — mean a lot. “I feel I can go into a coffee place and