A Beautiful Mind

I was very disappointed in A Beautiful Mind and couldn't finish it. There seemed to be too much math "talk" that I couldn't get past to get to the actual person and story. Maybe another day, I'll try to go back and finish it. I tried! :(

A disclaimer - I would have rated this book at least a 4, but I just could not because of the quality of the audio recording. First, the narrator was extremely "dry" - this was almost a 17 hour audio book and that is a very long time to have to listen to a dry reading. Second, the pausing between chapters was horrendous. One could not even take a breath between the end of the last sentence and the beginning of the next chapter. Finally, multiple times through out the recording, there were malfunctions such as skipped words, repeats, and odd recording flaws (keep in mind that I borrowed this book electronically from the public library so no CDs were involved - this was an audio download). I was very disappointed that such a magnificent book should receive such a poor quality recording.... In my opinion that cost a star.

Now onto the actual book.... The book was extremely well researched and the facts were well documented and written. The story was very interesting and I sincerely enjoyed learning about John Nash and the difficulties surrounding this life (both in health and illness). What really annoyed me, however, were the constant side bar discussions. Many times, I almost forgot I was listening to John Nash's biography because a side biography about someone else was brought in for, what seemed like, an eternity. I wanted to read about John Nash, not every other person he ever made eye contact with. Briefly discussing the key people is necessary, but going into background details of those people, when there was no consequence to the story being told, is too much and irrelevant. I found myself getting bored and not paying attention which then caused me to rewind because I was afraid I missed some key element in the story (each time I found that I had not).

Once I finished the book, I was able to really appreciate the story of John Nash, but only after I was able to plow my way through the unnecessary garbage. Next on my list is to watch the movie. Everyone has told me that it was brilliant.... I liked the book well enough to give it a go.

If you are up for a challenge, definitely read this book. Be prepared for heavy usage of the language of the discipline (i.e., advanced mathematical terms, etc.). Definitely a book that should be required reading as it shows an aspect of live and academia that is rarely seen by the "average" person.

Enjoy and Happy Reading.

A very interesting biography of mathematician and Nobel prize winner John Forbes Nash. From a 'good' background, Nash soon graduated on to becoming one of the top students at university, developing new theories and re-examining older problems (having only O level maths, much of this went right over my head.) But his behaviour - odd, arrogant, often unsocial - gradually morphed into something much worse, with a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
How Nash continued his work, even after years of illness, makes for a fascinating read. The arguments of the Nobel committee over whether to make an award to a person with mental illness; the gradual rapprochement (and re-marriage to) the wife who had divorced him; the gradual building of a relationship with his illegitimate son (and the sadness of having to cope with the fact that his other son had his father's illness.)

Nasar also helps the reader (even the non-mathematical) in having at least a vague idea of what value Nash's 'game theory' has to the man in the street. She looks at the 1994 'greatest auction ever', where the US government sold off airspace to TV companies etc; and how using the strategies of game theory helped maximize profits.

Informative and very well written.

I stumbled upon the audiobook version of "A Beautiful Mind" in the public library and decided to listen to it on some recent road trips. And what I discovered was a sad and fascinating tale of a broken genius, a brilliant mind with a hurting soul. I have recently rediscovered the splendor of a well-told biography, and this one certainly qualifies as such.

Though the story of John Nash includes dozens of scholars and publications whose names and titles I have never heard and scientific ideas and discoveries which float many miles above my intellectual capacity, Sylvia Nasar does a good job of engaging the reader. Her writing style was smart but accessible, detailed but fluid. It was a rather engrossing story that kept drawing me forward.

Of course, the story of John Nash is one of pain and suffering, both what his mental illness brought upon himself and that which he inflicted on virtually everybody in his life who tried so valiantly and with such shocking perseverance to give him chance after chance to get healthy and become productive again, according to the capacity of his historically magnificent intellect. And that health and productivity was illusive for decades, making his story rather agonizing for much of the book. It seems as if Nash spent the early part of his life as an arrogant jerk and most of the rest of his life in delusional sickness, so this story isn't warm and fuzzy.

But there was a glimmer of hope at the very end, that in acknowledging the limitations of his mental illness, Nash almost became more human and treated others more humanly. There is a beauty in that trajectory of healing and relational restoration, in the midst and even because of so much brokenness. I thought this entire journey was well-told and thoughtfully handled, without glossing over the difficulties but not wallowing in the suffering.

My primary critique of the book was the particular nature of its delivery, through an abridged audiobook. Having never done an abridged book before, I wondered how a story could be told in abridged format without losing something meaningful. And I found that it apparently can't be done or at least wasn't done here. Regularly, chapters would end seemingly in mid-thought, without appropriate resolution. The narrative flow was a mess. And I simply can't imagine why a publisher would cripple a book in this way. The unabridged audiobook is 18+ hours, and the abridged version is 5+ hours, it's no wonder that I continually felt like some of the connective tissue of this story was surely missing. What a disappointment!!

In any case, weird abridgment notwithstanding, this is a good book, an interesting biography worth reading. I'm happy to recommend it to anyone willing to sift through the darkness of a difficult story to see some level of redemption at the end.

This book took me through the full range of emotions. I felt awe, disgust, pity, wonder, joy, confusion, resolution, etc... Most of all it made me introspective as to how I treat others, and how the entire field of Psychiatry treats patients.

First of all, I learned that the movie took MANY liberties with the facts. It is about 20% truth, and the rest is style and effects. For many years I have enjoyed the movie and recommended it to friends. So I felt disillusioned when I found out how false it was. But then I thought about the truth, John Nash’s life, and the goals of the film.

John Nash did not have visual hallucinations. He didn’t see people who weren’t there, and he never imagined a roommate, or a little girl. But how else do you portray in a movie the reality of his delusions? How do you show a movie audience the absolute belief he had, and how much it had to hurt to find out that much of your life…is imaginary. He often thought he was working for the FBI, or for the world government. He thought he was Royalty, an Arab refugee, Job, Castro, a mouse. He thought he was traveling to Cairo, Kabul, Thebes, Mongolia, or even purgatory, inferno, or some sort of polluted heaven. He lived in constant fear of annihilation, Armageddon, the Apocalypse, the Final day of Judgment, and of certain ominous dates such as May 29th.

So I give the film license for showing Schizophrenia in a false light because it portrays the feeling, and the pain and despair that go along with it very well.

Here are other interesting things I never knew from the film.

John Nash was a draft dodger. It didn’t just scare him…it mortified him. He worked diligently for years to avoid the draft, wrote letters, used University faculty and presidents, and employed every means imaginable to avoid the draft.

Alicia (Nash’s wife) was not his first girlfriend, nor the mother of his first child. Eleanor was. They had a son named John David. His last name was not Nash however, because Eleanor and Nash were never married. Though they remained together for some time, and he sometimes spoke of marriage, it never happened.

Alicia at first perturbed me. She thought Nash was cute, and pursued him with great vigor (even getting a job at his favorite hang-out, just to see him more often.) Eventually they started sleeping together, until Eleanor arrived at his place one night, and found her there. After much screaming and crying by Eleanor, Nash said “My perfect little world is ruined.”

Alicia had quite a different reaction. Eleanor called Alicia to complain, and met with her to discuss the fact that She and Nash were getting married and already had a son. Alicia was pleased. She took the meeting as a sign that “She was beginning to matter.” She continued their courtship until eventually Alicia and Nash were married and had their own son, John Charles.

My initial thought was –“Alicia is so ruthless and cold that she deserves what’s coming.” I later regretted that thought. She stuck with Nash through the worst of times. She followed him all over Europe trying to find a place where he was content and sane, but it never happened. He bankrupted her, and left her many, many times.

Nash had homosexual flings. While working for a think tank called RAND, he was arrested in a restroom police sting for “indecent exposure.” This was one of many recorded occurrences when he had intimate relationships with men.

Eventually Alicia divorced him, and she believed it was for his good. He no longer had the stress of a family or obligations…he could go where he wanted when he wanted with no thought for a family.

Years later he finally settled down at Princeton again, and became known as “The Phantom.” He walked the hallways and wrote cryptic messages or math problems on the chalk boards.

He became a legend at Princeton among the students. Anybody who was too much of a grind or who lacked social graces was warned that he or she was “going to end up like the phantom”. Yet if a new student complained that having him around made him feel uncomfortable, he was immediately warned: “He was a better mathematician then you’ll ever be.”

John Nash was a brilliant mathematician. He solved problems in ways no one else had ever imagined. He proved that “every Riemannian manifold can be isometrically embedded into some Euclidean space.”
(FYI – this book has a ton of Math that I did not understand but accepted that it was really hard and really complex)

During this period at Princeton, after many hospitalizations, insulin coma therapy, and many attempts to renounce his U.S. citizenship and become a “Citizen of the World”; Alicia eventually let him move back in with her, and get to know his second son. And years later, after he won the Nobel Prize, they did remarry. Even when they were divorced, she felt responsible for him. She suffered huge amounts, and it didn’t end with him. Their son, John Charles, also has Paranoid Schizophrenia. I may not have liked how she entered his life, but she certainly proved her worth, and was indespensible.

I’ll end this book report with an Interesting Fact I learned from the book.

The Nobel prize in Economics (which Nash won in 1994) is not technically a Nobel Prize. The prize was not one of the awards set out in the will of Alfred Nobel. He listed only physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, and literature, which have been awarded since 1901. In 1968 an award was added for economics by the Central Bank of Sweden. And they provide the funding separately for the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”

P.S. This book changed the way I see Schizophrenia, and how I interact with Schizophrenic patients and their families. It has been a very worthwhile book for me. I hope others choose to enjoy it as well.

John Forbes Nash Jr. seemed an object of both admiration and pity from his earliest days. An undeniable prodigy, he was capable of brilliant insights that were regrettably sometimes obscured by his often offensive personality and social awkwardness. His contributions to mathematics, especially in game theory, earned him acclaim in his early twenties. Handsome and brashly self-confident, he attracted women, fathering a son by one and marrying another whose intellect matched his own and whose charm more than made up for his own shortcomings. He made brilliant contributions at Princeton, the Institute for Advanced Study, MIT, and the RAND corporation before succombing to paranoid schizophrenia in his early 30s. He spent years in a fog, in and out of institutions and lost in his own delusions before entering a long and gradual recovery that eventually saw him return to sanity. In 1995 he was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics, seemingly in recognition both of his great achievements as well as his remarkable remission.

Sylvia Nasar's biography of Nash ably chronicles his tumultuous life. It follows a generally chronological path, though the vicissitudes of his life, particularly during the darkest days of his illness, can make that difficult to follow at times. I was fascinated to read about his contributions in pure and applied mathematics (Nasar explains these clearly enough that readers like myself who have little experience with and less appreciation of that area can grasp their significance.) I found his personal travails difficult to read, though I was filled with admiration for his own strength of character and for the love and devotion given him by his family members and friends. I also enjoyed Nasar's descriptions of Nash's workplaces like the Institute for Advanced Study and the RAND corporation, and I found her analysis of Nash's illness very illuminating. And her description of the wheeling and dealing and sometimes savage politicking that can surround a Nobel Prize being awarded was extremely eye-opening.

A Beautiful Mind, like the movie of the same name which was based on it, is a deeply moving work that helps us understand better the mysteries of the human mind, in which great gifts and great delusions can sometimes co-exist.

Very well written. Very well researched book.
However, my sympathy for Nash is little, after reading this book. What astounded me throughout the book was, time after time after time again, the extraordinary patience that was exhibited on behalf of John Nash. Truly remarkable. From the American consulates, embassies and foreign services personnel, to campus security, to his fellow colleges, to students of his, to school's academic administrations, to dean's and principals, and most especially to both of the women that would bear his children. Unbelievably remarkable patience and compassion towards Nash from people all throughout his life and in every aspect of it and yet.... Nash meets this patience and compassion with hostility, arrogance, meanness, resentment...... on and on and this makes me wonder. Are many brilliant people eccentric? The history books would certainly suggest so but at what point do we draw the line between, yes you are blessed with a ton of intelligence and yes some of this intelligence if used well can be used to help the rest of mankind but when do we say that even though you are intelligent, you are still an adult and should be a responsible and accountable member of society?
Now for how much of nasty behavior, he was truly responsible for and how much of this behavior can be attributed to mental illness is unclear, certainly before 30, when Nash's first full blown schizophrenic happened. But the way that he treated his first "girlfriend" later to be dubbed his "mistress", is inexcusable by most ethical standards. Tearing her apart psychologically, constantly belittling her and degrading her. Using her for sex, but refusing to marry her because her "breeding" was not up to his very high and pompous social standards. And worst yet, having a child with her and refusing to pay for anything or help her out in any way, when he had plenty of money and then, forcing her to give the baby up for adoption, was quite disgusting and despicable.
His next "girlfriend" later to be dubbed "the wife" seems to have aligned in his mind with the very high and strict social status requirements and prerequisites that would have to exist for him to even consider a marriage proposal. This woman, certainly didn't have it any easy than his first victim. Knowing that John had already completely abandoned a first son and woman (whom she met), the wife continued to go through with her
marriage to him. Quickly taking the submissive and subservient role that the first woman had very much played, she dotted on John's every need and whim. Refusing to speak to her in front of any company, she was allowed to make him meals that she payed for. Upon becoming pregnant, Nash cared little for the new baby, expect to muse that it could be called the name to a famous mathematical dilemma. While she was pregnant, Nash suffered the first known and obvious wave of a schizophrenic break with reality. Subtle at times, other times full blown and far reaching, his behavior became first confusing, confounding and perplexing and then outright scary to all who knew him or crossed paths with him. Difficult to determine if he was truly sick, because he had been so incredibly eccentric and full of bizarre idiosyncrasies, most that knew him shrugged and decided he was playing some sort of peculiar joke. But it was no joke and his wife would suffer tremendously for it.

John Forbes Nash Jr was always different. His parents tried very hard to keep him socially active with other kids his age, desiring him to be "well-rounded", but it never really took with John, he just didn't fit in. By the time he had reached his early twenties, John Nash was already considered one of the most brilliant mathematicians in the world, making intuitive leaps in logic that often baffled his colleagues. Then it all started to slip away. For a number of years, he spent time in one hospital or sanitarium after another, until the world had all but forgotten about him. There was no cure for the schizophrenia that John suffered from, and cases of recovery were almost non-existent. It appeared that the world had lost one of its greatest minds far too soon.

The story of John Nash's almost miraculous recovery and re-emergence into the world eye at the 1994 Nobel Prize Award ceremony is inspiring to say the least. His contributions to the world of mathematics and economics and his dogged determination to persist, even in the deepest depths of his paranoia, can serve as a heroic example to us all. Never quit. Never give up.

Sylvia Nasar's research and presentation are exemplary. Not only does she give a detailed account of Nash's life and times, but also delves into the history of the people and places that played key roles in his story. The only complaint I have, and it's a minor one, is that some of the explanations of Nash's mathematics went way over my head and I had a hard time following. You can hardly leave the mathematics out of Nash's story, however, and I'm guessing that his mathematical genius just can't be expressed in layman's terms, so I'm willing to forgive Nasar for making me feel a little stupid. The author knows her stuff.

Narrator Anna Fields did a good job as well. I usually judge narrators on how well they voice the different characters, and how well they read dialogue, but A Beautiful Mind is a biography and had none of those things. So all I can really mention is Fields' inflection and intonation, of which I have no complaint.

If you like non-fiction biographies, you're sure to love A Beautiful Mind. Nash is a fascinating subject and it's easy to see why Sylvia Nasar chose to write about him.

After growing up in West Virginia and completing undergraduate studies at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, John Nash became one of the most promising young mathematicians in the country. It was during his graduate work at Princeton, then the "center of the [mathematical] universe," that Nash made his seminal contribution to game theory. Appointed to an instructorship at M.I.T., Nash continued to break mathematical ground, particularly with his "embedding theorem" in algebraic geometry. By the mid-1950s everything seemed promising for the young Nash, working as a visiting scholar the Institute of Advanced Study, rubbing elbows with the likes of Norbert Wiener and John Von Neumann, and consulting on the application of game theory to national defense for the RAND corporation.

But things began to unravel for Nash, first in his personal life--Nasar describes his series of homosexual and hetersexual affairs that would culminate in Nash marrying a young physics student--and then with the rapid onset of schizophrenia. Nash's paranoia would lead him to quit his position at MIT and criss-cross Europe in an attempt to establish a world government. After several round of hospitalization (always involuntary) and plenty of second chances, Nash would return to Princeton, to roam the campus as the "Phantom of Fine Hall" in the 1970s. Most remarkably, Nash's schizophrenia would gradually remit, slowly allowing him to return to a relatively normal life, reunited with wife Alicia. Nash's return culminated with his award of the 1994 pseudo-Nobel Prize in Economics, Nasar's biography, and the subsequent Hollywood Oscar winner.

Nasar's biography is lacking where one would expect a economics journalist to stumble in writing about mathematics. The book does not adequately convey the substance of Nash's mathematics, or his "beautiful mind," generally resorting to vague descriptions and third-party testimonials. But for the most part it is the fast-paced and engaging account of a life at the interface of mathematics and mental illness.

Perhaps one may consider it a paradox of sorts to refer to John Nash's mind as "Beautiful". Mental illness in itself, is not beautiful. Wouldn't it be more accurate to talk about Nash within the context of schizophrenia rather than in terms of "genius"? Well, Isn't that the point of this story? Both creative genius and mental disorder sometimes occupy the same grey matter we call mind. This is the case with John Nash. Told with such eloquence and compassion by Nasar, that her book warranted a follow up in the form of a first class movie. What we learn about Nash is that he was a loner who avoided social interaction at all costs. The precursor of full blown schizophrenia is the condition Nasar tells us is "schizoid". This "schizoid' diagnosis is a fitting one since we describe such an individual as unsociable and peculiarly out of touch with mainstream society. Alienated from himself as much as from others, Nash was free to explore the furthest reaches of his imagination eventuating in the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics. There is nothing about this book I might call, dull. On the contrary, learning about Nash himself, his family dynamics etc. was as fascinating as learning about the devastating effects of mental illness on himself and loved ones. When I think of a "Beautiful Mind", I think of Nasar and her telling and explaining and exploring the meaning of Nash's life of creativity and despair. I learned about game- theory, the university system, the mental health system, as well as the multiple implications of schizophrenia and its treatment. This is a book one can read on more than one level. It's about life with its multiplicity of contradictions. It's about the idea of 'genius' as 'coherence', 'originality' and 'complexity'. This book is also about hope, courage and generosity of spirit that Nasar describes here as, "Beautiful". We ultimately discover that any one of us would become unbalanced if we were to be 'locked-up' for a long time. This is true, I believe, whether one is literally 'locked-up, or, figuratively locked-up. In conclusion, we learn from John Nash's biography why dehumanization-is as dehumanization-does. That is, what comes around, goes around. Not even a genius such as Nash, can see beyond the structure of his personality. And so, Nasar gives us only glimpses of a "sometimes"" 'Beautiful Mind'.

In Sylia Nasar's award-winning biography, A Beautiful Mind, which chronicles the life of mathematics genius and Nobel laureate John Nash, she divides his life into three acts (though the table of contents does not): genius, madness and reawakening. Act one, his genius phase, covers the first two parts of the book, and lasts for the first 29 years of his life. Act two - madness, which takes the form of schizophrenia - covers the next two parts, and lasts until he is 62. Act three, his awakening, covers his remission from schizophrenia, his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for Economics in 1994, and his life at Princeton up to the present. The book was made into an Oscar-winning motion picture by director Ron Howard in 2001 and stars Russell Crowe. Both book and film are phenomenal, as are the man's life and Crowe's portrayal of it.

Particularly interesting about act one of Nash's life, and part one of Nasar's book, is the discussion on game theory. Game theory, up until the time of Nash, was based upon the idea that only one player in a game can win and everyone else must lose. But Nash broke with tradition in his doctoral thesis by theorizing mathematically the results of a game in which everyone won, regardless of the number of players. His thesis became the basis of modern economic theory, and the reason for his eventual Nobel prize.

Nasar does an exceptional job explaining game theory and the workings of the mind of a genius, and especially Nash's original idea, which he called "the Nash equilibrium," and introduced in 1950 when he was only 21. Nash theorized that a game could be both competitive and cooperative - as opposed to the "winner take all" stakes of purely competitive games like chess - and could result in a desirable balance of power, rather than the undesirable condition of domination by a single power. In other words, when a player considers both his own good and the collective good of the other players, the results are better for everyone. This allowed gaming theory to be applicable to economics, politics and other sciences.

In Ron Howard's film, he illustrates this beautifully with the scene in the bar in which all the boys want the beautiful blonde who walks in. Russell Crowe's character, Nash, explains to his friends that if they all go for the blonde, they will all lose, because they will offend the blonde's friends, causing them all to strike out. But if each of them goes for a different girl, they will all score. This is the moment Nash realizes he has found the original idea for his doctoral thesis.

Socially, Nash had no friends growing up. This is ironic for a person whose greatest contribution to science was a theory of relationships. It is also interesting in that it illustrates something about the environment needed to develop into both a genius and a schizophrenic: isolation. As Nasar puts it, "His overriding interest was in patterns, not people." I don't think a lack of interest in people is required for genius, but I do believe an interest in patterns is. It was his ability to see patterns in numbers that led Nash into numerology and decoding imagined ciphers for the Pentagon.

Howard does an excellent job showing Nash's ability to recognize pattern in the opening scene when Russell Crowe insults a fellow student's tie after recognizing several patterns in it that are reflected in the layout of the punch table. He does it again when he is able to pick out the pattern of an umbrella in the stars for his love interest and future wife, Alicia, played by Jennifer Connelly. And when he is decoding for agent Parcher, played by Ed Harris, the patterns that he sees in the numbers and words "light up."

Until he meets Alicia, who would stand by him through his illness and help him overcome it, Nash's relationships are cloaked in mystery and innuendoes. It is not important to get into them here; but let me just say that the homosexual community was vocally disappointed by Howard's choice to leave them out of his film. I believe he was right to do so, if for no other reason than that they would have added nothing to the story; but more because no one is certain of what those relationships consisted. Nash himself did not consider himself a homosexual, so it may be that they were merely codependent. Regardless, they would undoubtedly have been immature and ego-centric, as all his personal relationship were before he met Alicia.

Alicia brought something to Nash's life that he had never experienced before: another focus besides himself and mathematics. Before her, his world revolved around the fact that he considered himself a mathematical genius. Now there was someone else to consider. Alicia drove a wedge into an otherwise self-focused, isolated life. She was the person that would recognize his slipping into schizophrenia - although she didn't know what it was at the time - and she was the one that would bring him back. Connelly is wonderful in the role of Alicia. Howard uses their relationship in the film to turn an otherwise straight thriller into a love story. It is this combination that makes A Beautiful Mind very much like a Hitchcock film; and yet, because it is true, it is even more interesting.

Ron Howard is masterful at blurring the line between what is real and what is not in Nash's world. We are never really sure until the day of the storm, when Alicia goes out to get the laundry off the line and discovers what is in the garage. That is an exciting scene, especially when combined with the scene of the baby's bath, and then with the scene following in which Parcher (Harris) holds a gun on Alicia and tells Nash that she is threatening the mission. The conclusion that Nash voices, as he tries to prevent Alicia from leaving, breaks the tension: "She never grows old" (talking about Charles' niece Marcee). That is when he shows he realizes that something is wrong in his world.

How he deals with his problem is what makes his "a beautiful mind." Once he is diagnosed with schizophrenia, he is given the usual drug and shock treatments. But he realizes that the treatments being administered to save his mind are also destroying it. With Alicia's consent and help, he tries to overcome his problem using the power of his own mind. It is because of her love and support, and the support of the mathematics community, that he succeeds.

There is a key scene in the movie - the scene when he receives the recognition of his colleagues in the faculty dining room in the "pen ceremony" - when Thomas King tells him about his being considered for the Nobel Prize. Nash explains to King how he overcame his schizophrenia. He says it is like having an appetite for something but, rather than feeding it, choosing to starve it. He said he had an appetite for certain things in his life that weren't real. They are still there - talking about Charles, Marcee and Parcher - but he doesn't acknowledge them. Thus, they no longer have the power to affect his life.

To me, this is the take-away from both Nasar's book and Howard's film. We all have appetites for things that are not healthy, not real - fantasies in which we play "what if" scenarios in our heads. Like Nash, we can choose to ignore them and go on to lead happy, healthy, productive lives. Or, as he did during his mad period, we can indulge and become involved with them, allowing them to affect and ultimately destroying us. Like Nash, we have power over our own thoughts, and, thereby, over our own lives. If we choose well, we, too, will have beautiful minds and beautiful lives. It's up to us.

Waitsel Smith

A fascinating story chronicling one man's harrowing descent into madness, A Beautiful Mind elucidates schizophrenia and its debilitating effects as well as any previously published work of any genre. In this well-researched (and apparently unauthorized) biography of John Forbes Nash, the 1994 Nobel Prize winner for economics, Sylvia Nasar carefully explores even the earliest memories of Nash in his childhood for any indicators of his incipient psychosis.

Showing signs of brilliance as early as 8, Nash experiences what most would view as a normal upbringing in a stable, loving family. Once he reaches high school, it becomes evident to Nash's teachers that he is an extraordinarily gifted student. His superior intellect would eventually be accompanied by an outsized ego and a relentless drive for preeminence in the world of mathematics.

Most captivating about Nash's story are the people who love him and who, even while he decompensates in a New Jersey state mental hospital, refuse to abandon him. Without a doubt the most devoted of those is Nash's beautiful and intensely loyal wife, Alicia. A remarkable human being by anyone's measure, Alicia recognizes that Nash, during intermittent periods of lucidity, can be capable of great generosity, love and kindness.

Continually challenged by his erratic and increasingly bizarre behavior, Alicia remains hopeful that Nash can control his illness with medication. She believes he can live a somewhat normal life and continue to pursue his passion for mathematics. The unusual dynamic in the couple's relationship, which Nasar examines in thorough detail, is definitely the most intriguing element of this amazing story.

For this reader, A Beautiful Mind was a revelation. The popular and Oscar-winning 2001 movie starring Russell Crowe tends to whitewash Nash's difficult personality, portraying him in a more or less positive light.

Nasar's work, in contrast, reveals a far more complicated Nash - a more self-absorbed, egotistical, even irresponsible man. For instance, before the onset of his illness he behaves callously toward his family, at one point even refusing to acknowledge, much less accept, responsibility for a son he fathers out of wedlock. Even when years later he reconciles with his illegitimate son, Nash as father is petty and hypercritical.

Less well-known about John Forbes Nash's story and revealed in Nasar's book, Alicia eventually divorces Nash. As Nasar describes, she becomes "exhausted and dispirited by three years of turmoil and convinced that Nash's condition was more or less hopeless." Because it might diminish the seemingly endless loyalty Alicia shows toward her troubled husband, this circumstance is omitted from the movie version. In the book, the Nashes do eventually reconcile but only as "housemates" in their shared Princeton residence.

Through most of A Beautiful Mind, the reader finds Alicia, not Nash, to be the truly sympathetic character. It is not until Nash accepts his Nobel Prize in Stockholm that one feels the considerable weight of all Nash's struggles suddenly lifted. There is then great poignancy in this story, and one is awestruck that this man has endured such hardship and still emerged a highly venerated academician.

It becomes apparent to the reader at this point in the book that if it were not for Alicia's loyalty and the support of Nash's closest friends - those individuals who never lose faith in him and who deeply respect his many gifts - his contributions to the fields of mathematics and economics, principally in game theory, would not have received the recognition they so obviously deserved.

Perhaps most ironic about Nash's story, and thoroughly explained in Nasar's recounting of the events that precipitate his illness, psychological stresses including his perceived rejection by the mathematics community cause his downward spiral into insanity.

From Nasar's research, symptoms of schizophrenia emerge as a result of "things that build up, things that lead to a lot of brooding." From A Beautiful Mind, we learn that many events in Nash's life even from childhood compound over time to cause his initial break with reality. Interestingly, his relentless pursuit of success in mathematics may have served as a catalyst for the onset of his illness.

Further, Nash's symptoms persist largely because he refuses to accept his condition, to seek a physician's care, and to remain compliant with his antipsychotic drug therapy. He appears to believe that he can live a normal life (and pursue his career) without sustained medical intervention. Repeatedly, throughout A Beautiful Mind, Nash loses his fight against the unremitting grip of psychosis.

Meticulously researched, A Beautiful Mind offers arguably the most comprehensive examination of schizophrenia in layman's terms available today. Slow and plodding at times, however, the book tends to be overly detailed in its description of the events that shape Nash's life. To this reader, many of those details seem superfluous.

The passages outlining the causes of schizophrenia and how they parallel Nash's situation are clearly the most interesting and necessary. Through these, the reader gains a much deeper appreciation for the debilitating effects of this disease and just how hard the disease is on both the patient and his support network of family and friends.

Finally, this remarkable account of one couple's steadfast love and respect for one another through perhaps the most trying of circumstances is well worth the read.

Highly recommended!

An Unusual Story Well Told

I would have really loved to finish this, as Nash was a very interesting person, but the first section of the book was just way too technical to get through unless you happened to major in mathematics. I found myself spacing out constantly because I had no idea what was being talked about and there was rarely any explanations given. I would have loved to keep reading, but with over 200 pages left, I wasn't looking forward to it.

This book is an interesting and well-written account of a highly intelligent and creative man who suffered from schizophrenia. Like many people, I first heard of Nash by watching the movie starring Russell Crowe. The movie is true to the basic outline of the biography, but omits or fudges many relevant details. For example, the movie didn't mention Nash's travels to Europe or his divorce. From the movie, one would think that Nash's disorder began at graduate school at Princeton, since that is when he first "sees" his imaginary roommate. This imaginary roommate isn't mentioned in the book.

Although eccentric and strange, Nash didn't suffer his first breakdown until age 30, which is relatively late for schizophrenia. If Nash had developed this disorder when he was 20, no one would have heard of him, and there would be no biography to read. It's important to emphasize this point. For every famous person like Nash, there are thousands of talented people who, due to mental illness, never get a chance to exercise their talents.

What precipitated Nash's initial breakdown? It could have been his marriage that occurred two years before, along with his wife's pregnancy. Stress is known to precipitate psychiatric symptoms, and major life changes like getting married and having a child are significant sources of stress. It could have been a European honeymoon trip that Nash and his wife went on about 6 months prior to his breakdown. There's no way to know for sure.

After his breakdown and initial hospitalization, Nash gave up his tenured position at MIT and headed to Europe, where he would spend the next 9 months, attempting to renounce his U.S. citizenship and become a "world citizen." This behavior exemplifies that the severe mental illnesses are primarily disorders of instability. Who in his right mind would give up a tenured faculty position at MIT? Most normal people crave stability, and there's nothing more stable than a tenured position. Mentally ill people crave the opposite; for them the stability of a tenured position is both frightening and undesirable. Nash's travels are further indications of instability.

After Nash returned to the U.S., he had temporary episodes of sanity alternating with psychotic episodes. With some brief exceptions, he wasn't able to resume his career until he had a remission in his fifties. This remission occurred after having lived a relatively quiet and stable life at Princeton for over ten years. Nash won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994.

Nasar's biography convinces me that schizophrenia is closer to bipolar disorder than Alzheimer's Disease. Schizophrenia is an episodic disease, characterized by alternating sanity and insanity, of rational thought and delusions. At least in Nash's case, it doesn't appear to be degenerative.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in the biographical details of an eminent man's battle with mental illness.

I assisted Nash with the C programming language at Princeton and was a source for the book.

I found the book accurate, well-written, and readable. The part of the book that talks about the period in which Nash's economics prize was considered was indeed one in which this very private man was under a microscope, and my supervisor warned me to be very sensitive to his condition.

Sylvia Nasar knows her craft very well. The book is narratively organized, and she doesn't need to do dramatic flashbacks or grabbers to get you to keep turning the pages. It's a man's life, in America of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s...to the early nineties, by which time Nash had become the Phantom of Fine Hall.

But, Phantoms have a story too. Anyone interested in the human side of math and science, anyone interested in psychology, anyone who is impressed by women who both "stand by their man" and get a career of their own, will enjoy reading the story.

The book is much more detailed and far more accurate than the movie, which had to take liberties with the truth to be entertaining. It includes Nash's other common-law wife Eleanor and a son by that marriage, which was very different from Nash's relationship with Alicia.

The book is long but will probably be very rewarding for most readers.

+++++

This biography chronicles the life of John Forbes Nash Jr. (born: 1928).

This book consists first of a prologue then five parts that make up the narrative. As a brief synopsis, part one details Nash's mathematical genius. This is, I feel, the most important part of the book. Part two gives us insight into Nash's relationships. Part three describes Nash's slipping into mental illness and his first hospitalization (around age thirty). Part four gives readers an account of Nash's full-blown mental illness, his several hospitalizations, the love and patience of his ex-wife who helps him cope, and the support, loyalty, and patience of the mathematical community. Lastly, part five tells us of his remission from mental illness (after thirty years) and his sharing of the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics (for his part in the pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games).

This book has a number of good features:

(1) THE PROLOGUE. This is really a summary of the five parts discussed above. It prepares the reader for the detailed chapters that follow. I feel that this extremely well written prologue is a major feature of the book.

(2) "MINI-BIOGRAPHIES." In the main narrative, the author does not only briefly mention important people (such as mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers) but in many instances gives a good description of who they are and what they accomplished.

(3) VIVID DESCRIPTIONS OF PLACES. For example, the author's description of Princeton in the late '40s/early '50s made me feel that I was really there. Her description of what occurs behind the scenes before a Nobel Prize is given out is exquisite.

(4) INFORMATION ABOUT SCHIZOPHRENIA. As the biography progresses, important up-to-date information about this disease that can shatter lives is given to us for our understanding.

(5) NASH'S MATHEMATICS. The author introduces the reader to important mathematical concepts. Some of these include game theory, Prisoner's Dilemma, cooperative versus non-cooperative games, symmetric versus asymmetric games, bargaining, algebraic manifolds, and quantum mechanics. For those readers who want more information on these concepts, they can refer to the references included in the notes (footnotes at the back of the book) section and bibliography section.

(6) PHOTOGRAPHS. There are twenty-six black-and-white ones located at the end of part one. These range from Nash's youth to when he won his shared Nobel Prize.

(7) THE EPILOGUE. This is very brief but informative. It tells us about Nash's life after his Nobel Prize win.

The main problem I had with this book is when the author attempts to explain the mathematical concepts that she introduces (as explained in (5) above). I think the problem here is that her mathematical descriptions are all written and thus difficult to follow. The use of diagrams and charts would have made these concepts more concrete. For example, the concept of the Prisoner's Dilemma can be explained very clearly with a chart. As well, a mathematical glossary would have been helpful. It should be mentioned that understanding these mathematical concepts is NOT necessary to follow this biography.

This problem brings up the movie (which I saw after reading the book first). The movie has to condense a lifetime into a two-hour film. Thus, much of the book's content is not in the film. But the movie, being a visual medium, does illustrate the Prisoner's Dilemma well (near the beginning of the movie where Nash and his friends are attempting to pick up girls). And the movie is very creative in explaining Nash's mental problem.

In conclusion, if you want to learn about a man who "ranks among the greatest mathematicians of the post-war era" and learn how genius can be cloaked in madness, then read this interesting and moving biography!!

+++++

I first read Sylvia Nasar's biography of John Nash shortly after it was released in 1998. I had heard Nasar interviewed on "All Things Considered" while driving home from work one day, and was intrigued by her story of this enigmatic Princeton mathematician who had emerged from the fog of mental illness to win the Nobel prize in economics in 1994. I borrowed the book from the library and remember vividly what a great glimpse it was into the life of a mathematical genius as well as the tormented hell of schizophrenia.
When Ron Howard made Nasar's book and Nash's life into a movie last year, I knew instantly it was a "must-see." I enjoyed the movie tremendously, but noted the necessary compromises Howard had to make in telling such a complex story on screen in just two hours. I was motivated to finally buy the book and read it carefully again.
A Beautiful Mind is actually three books, intertwined and integrated. The first tells the story of the meteoric rise of the brilliant young mathematician from West Virginia; his college years at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, graduate school at Princeton, followed by fellowships at the RAND Corporation and teaching at M.I.T. His mathematical achievements, including his Nobel winning work in bargaining theory, as well as later (and arguably more mathematically significant) work are well covered in terms that will not be overly obscure for a non-mathematician.
The second book has to do with Nash's personal life, relationships with family, friends, equally brilliant colleagues, his relationship with Eleanor and their illegitimate child, his marriage to Alicia, their child, and subsequent divorce.
The third book details his quirky personality and sudden descent into severe mental illness in 1959, the years of on and off hospitalization, and then the "phantom" years and slow recovery. Nash spent fully 30 years of his life struggling with his delusions, a staggering amount of time lost for such a genius. Nash must still be tormented by the lost promise of what could have been achieved in those years.
It is an intensely fascinating story and Nasar shows her mastery of the facts on every page. Many of the years of drifting and roaming the halls of Princeton's math department in the 1970's and 80's were hard to reconstruct, but she gives an excellent feel for what Nash's life must have been like during those dark times.
Nasar's book also presents a chronology of the development of psychiatry's understanding and treatment of schizophrenia. We see Nash subjected to involuntary hospitalizations, psychotropic drug treatment, insulin therapy (also graphically portrayed in the movie), psychoanalysis, and more. Through his exploits during the dark years, we get a glimpse of the tormented and irrational thought processes that dominate the mind of affected individuals. And we get a sense of the prognosis - normally quite poor - but in Nash's case marked my an apparent remission that has left his mind relatively intact.
Nasar gives fair treatment to the question of post-recovery doubts regarding the initial diagnosis: was Nash really schizophrenic, or did he have some other psychotic condition, but one that has a higher likelihood of recovery (e.g., bi-polar)? The fact that his youngest son was also diagnosed with schizophrenia is telling, since the disorder is now known to have a strong genetic component, but others who look at his history of symptoms already have little reason to doubt the validity of the original diagnosis.
This is a compelling story and an extremely well written book. It is a touching account that has both a fairy-tale ending and an overwhelming sense of tragedy.

Much has been said about this book and movie, pros and cons whichever way you may look at it. Much can be gained and enjoyed from these two different outlooks into the life of a man who not only was a mathematical genius but also a man with a controversial personality. John Nash embodies those rare cases in which an individual is endowed with a mind that surpasses the normal and also does not fit into what we term as "socially acceptable behavior." He was able to develop one of the most complex mathematical theories (Game Theory), and in his personal life he was sadistic, arrogant, and selfish. His friends and colleagues felt divided between admiration for Nash's intellectual feats and his awkward behavior.
Nasar's approach in writing this biography is strictly professional and academic. She has done a vast research into the personal life of Nash, his time, the academic environment, the effect schizophrenia had on Nash, and the intricacies of Noble Prize winning. She does get carried away in detailed explanations of the academic milieu, of the competitive environment and life circunstances of several mathematicians who directly or indirectly had contact with John Nash. She does browse over some advanced mathematical concepts but the reader should not expect in this biography a theoretical analysis of Game Theory (there are several technical books on the market solely dedicatd to this theory and its effects on social and biological sciences).
As to how Nasar addresses Nash's schizophrenia, she successfully recounts the trials Nash had to face, the methods then used to deal with a serious mental illness that affects more than two million Americans and 1 in 100 people across the world. Although this is a biography and not a treatise on schizophrenia, the author could have further expanded on this topic since it is the core of Nash's problems, of his personality traits, of professional career, and his inspiring remission. To what extent were his high intellectual capabilities responsible for his rebouncing into reality, for his abilities to overcome his delusions?
Despite the flaws that might have been previously mentioned, the story of Nash is by itself interesting and fascinating. Whoever saw the movie should read the book as well. You will have some surprises, because movies and books are different means of communication, the emotions they convey can be radically different.

A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash by Sylvia Nasar. Recommended.
The prologue to Sylvia Nasar's biography of Nobel Laureate John Nash, Jr., summarizes the mathematical marvel's life thus: genius, madness, reawakening.
Nash, who was awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics in a controversy that would ultimately change the nature of the prize, is the child of mostly unremarkable parents. His father, John, Sr., held a middle-manager position with the Appalachian Power Company inspecting power lines, while his mother, Virginia, was a "public-school thinker." Despite his mother's efforts to push him, he remains socially isolated, without any close friends. In the fourth grade, he begins to demonstrate the original approach to problems that will become his hallmark as a genius. Interestingly enough, it will be an extensive network of friends and peers that helps to ensure Nash's place in academic and Nobel history.
Nash may have a "beautiful mind" with a unique way of looking at difficult problems, but Nasar does not portray him as a likeable man in his pre-mental illness heyday. Lacking in social skills and graces but not in ego, he is a class snob. Like many boys and young men, he plays pranks-but many of his have pathological undertones. Some cause serious physical pain and embarrassment. Others have the potential to cause death (one person recounts how a Nash prank might have resulted in electrocution of the victim). As a student and young academic, he delights in one-upmanship and in the humiliation of less-gifted men. In a recurring theme, he will flirt romantically with other bright young men. Much is forgiven Nash by his mentors and peers, however, because of his unquestioned mathematical gifts and because such behavior (at least, to some extent) is expected of great mathematical minds.
At the peak of his career, Nash succumbs to what is diagnosed as schizophrenia, which Nasar implies may have been the result of stress brought about by concerns about being drafted and Nash's insistence on tackling near-impossible problems and the resulting frustrations. Whatever the cause, Nash becomes delusional, thinking aliens are speaking to him through The New York Times and feeling a compelling need to renounce his U.S. citizenship and to become a world citizen. For the next 30 years, Nash-and his genius-will be lost to the world, which, if it thinks of him at all, thinks him dead.
It is only a few years before he is nominated for the Nobel Prize in Economics (for his contributions to game theory) that Nash will slowly emerge from his illness. During this time, much of the mathematics community, including friends and rivals who were uncomfortable with his illness, rally behind him. Through most of his adult life, his wife, Alicia, is there to take care of him-even after marriage, divorce, and remarriage.
To write A Beautiful Mind, Nasar read and interviewed dozens of mathematicians, physicists, economists, and other academics as well as psychiatrists and mental health experts, making the book more than just a biography of John Nash, Jr. It is also an insightful overview of the tightly knit mathematics worlds of Princeton, MIT, and RAND Corporation during the 1940s and 1950s. Nash's treatment at several private and public mental health institutions is revealing and sometimes horrifying, especially when he is treated with insulin shock therapy. The political climate-the draft for the Korean conflict, anti-Semitism, McCarthyism and its chilling effect on American academia, and the arms and space races with the Soviets-are all vivid parts of Nash's story.
It is probably in the nature of biography that the author cannot be entirely subjective toward his or her subject; after all, he or she must have enough passion about that subject to research and write hundreds of pages about it. Nasar is clearly a fan of Nash's; she often excuses or glosses over his youthful bad behaviour, his capacious ego, his poor treatment of those he considers inferior (including his girlfriend Eleanor and their son John David Stier), and his obsessive competitiveness. She describes him repeatedly as "handsome" with an "Olympian body" and "finely modeled" or "chiseled" features. (The photos included show Nash to have an average face and body.)
Nasar speeds through the 1970s and 1980s, no doubt because they were uneventful for the "Phantom of Fine Hall." This leaves the reader to wonder what Nash's official position was at Princeton (he tells a visitor he shouldn't go into the faculty club). At this time, he appears to have had an office and is tolerated by students and staff alike.
I am always interested in genius, especially genius derailed by an enigmatic mental illness such as schizophrenia. A question (not to be answered) might be: Is Nash a genius despite schizophrenia, or is the schizophrenia an inherent part of what makes him a genius? Are the two conditions distinct, or are they inseparable? At any rate, while Nash may not have what I would consider a "beautiful mind," it is certainly a gifted-and cursed-one.
Diane L. Schirf, 25 June 2003.

This biography of the Nobel Prize winner and schizophrenic mathematical genius John Forbes Nash surprisingly brings to mind the main character in Dostoyevsky's great novel, "Crime and Punishment." Like the intense, reclusive student, Raskolnikov, Nash in this biography comes across as an extremely anti-social and arrogant young man, convinced that his genius gives him certain rights and freedoms beyond the petty restrictions, rules, and manners that govern normal human conduct.
But whereas Dostoyevsky's character commits a murder, Nash's main offense is merely to be an arrogant and boorish lout, forever trying to show off to his fellow students at Princeton. When he is later struck down by mental illness after achieving so much so young, we can't help feeling there is an element of hubris involved.
Nash also fits into the popular paradigm of the lop-sided genius, the person of incredible talents who can't deal with the simpler aspects of daily life. As in the case of the notoriously absent-minded Albert Einstein -- whom Nash meets in the book -- or the equally eccentric Isaac Newton, we somehow feel reassured that these supreme geniuses have their weaknesses. For all these reasons, this is a story that resonates on a mythic and psychological level. We keep rooting for Nash, but also secretly look forward to him tripping up. This reflects the ambivalent attitude to the sciences that most people have -- we are both intrigued by new discoveries but afraid of their ramifications.
Around the age of 30, Nash's quest to find greater meaning in the Universe sparked off his insanity as he started to discern complex codes implanted by extra-terrestrials in the random occurrence of certain letters of the alphabet in daily life. But, although this is essentially a tragedy of a brilliant mind struck down by schizophrenia, it is nevertheless one with a happy ending. After paying his dues for his genius and arrogance, Nash gradually recovers and receives his apotheosis in the 1994 Nobel Prize for economics.
Movies and books are radically different media, so don't expect this to read like the recent Oscar-winning movie that it inspired. The expansiveness of the written word allows for much more detail to emerge as well as countless digressions and forays into the worlds of science and mathematics that the movie had no space for. So, if you saw the movie and loved it, this biography still has plenty to offer.

Those who have seen the movie, A Beautiful Mind, will soon find in reading this book that the movie is not to be found inside. It is not, of course, unusual for Hollywood to take liberties with source material, but in this case one may say that the movie is basically a fictitious version of John Nash's life.
A few major examples: Nash first manifested symptoms of schizophrenia around age 30, not when he was a graduate student at Princeton. The work for which he received the Nobel was completed prior to the onset of the disease. He had no visual hallucinations, which eliminates the imagined espionage that formed the core of the movie. I could go on, but I only wanted to make a point. That point being that the filmmakers created dramatic, action packed scenes that never actually happened and in so doing missed the real story of John Nash, which I believe is a much better one.
This book, with supporting footnotes and bibliography, tells the story of a man who could almost be described as a sociopath long before the illness struck. As I read the book, the vision that came to mind was of a whirlwind that left a trail of (emotional) devastation in its wake. There was the woman who bore him a son out of wedlock; a son he refused to lift a finger or spend a penny to support. She remained loyal to Nash even though she was forced to place her son in foster care on numerous occasions as a result of Nash's callousness. There was his wife who faithfully followed him to Europe where he intended to renounce his American citizenship. It was only through her efforts and the good graces of the French government that he avoided becoming, quite literally, a man without a country. Long after their divorce, she took John in when he came to her with nowhere else to go. There were the associates who he ridiculed and belittled both personally and for their work even though, in some cases, they were trying to help him achieve the recognition he so desperately sought. Even the Nobel committee who made it possible for him to receive the prize literally destroyed itself in the process.
The real story, in my opinion, is of the many people who took the brunt of his mean-spirited selfishness and then, when Nash needed it, put their time, their reputations, and even their careers on the line to help him. It is a remarkable tribute to the innate kindness of so many people who were willing to forgive so much for this broken genius of a man.
For 388 pages Sylvia Nasar leads the reader through John Nash's fascinating life from his birth to the present. But, when all was said and done, I felt as though I had read the first 378 pages so that I could understand the heart-wrenching final ten.

Slyvia Nasar is to be congratulated for delving into the complex world of mathematics, an arcane topic--game theory--,and the prickly Nobel Laureate, John Nash, who did seminal work in the field--and making it interesting. Despite the subject material, one does not need to be a mathematician to gain a vague idea of the world of higher mathematics though some of us, like me, who found Algebra I and 2 a trial, will have eye glaze problems when some of the equations and other mathematical jargon are used. Ms. Nasar organizes the book chronologically and gives good balance to the various phases of Nash's life through a multitude of interviews with persons who knew Nash, supplemented by more limited documentary evidence from letters, publications, and the like. The Princeton parts of the book are well described in recreating the flavor of the town and academic atmosphere. But the real heart of the book is Nash himself, his quirks, his genius, his descent into schizophrenia and, finally, remission and reward. A very interesting sidelight is her revelations about the workings of the secretive Nobel Prize committee.
The author is right in stressing that Nash's remission from schizophrenia is, alas, the exception rather than the rule. And she has read about and contacted a number of those active in the field of schizophrenia to make sure her observations are based on current conventional wisdom of this illness. Despite the detail in the book, I came away with some questions: for example, Nash was not a particularly social being--in fact he was often rude and off-putting--in his youth and early years before his breakdown. Were these personality quirks somehow related to schizophrenia, or were they simply byproducts of a "beautiful mind," someone so deeply into the abstract world of deep-think that they have little time or interest in how to be a well-adjusted person? I also thought that Nasar's narrative occasionally was a little cloying to some of her subjects and that she sometimes projected what a person was feeling without indicating how she knew this.
But these are minor quibbles. The book is a thought provoking examination of several different "worlds" carried off with considerable panache. Buy it and see the movie--which I intend to do.

If there's a more terrifying affliction than mental illness, an inability to control the one thing that truly belongs to you, your thoughts, I can't imagine what it would be. Sylvia Nasar's carefully researched and very well-written book takes the reader along on such a horrible journey, following the slow descent of mathemetician John Nash into a devastating paranoid schizophrenia that, in many ways, robbed Nash of close to a quarter-century of his life.
Nasar begins with Nash's childhood and follows him through college and graduate school, introducing us to a man at once awe-inspiring and yet in many ways wholly unadmirable. Nash was an arrogant, unpleasant, in some ways reprehensible human being who frequently treated other people as little more than tools for his use or objects for his entertainment. Yet he was also an incredible genius whose ability to solve incredibly complex mathematical problems and his breakthrough that would lead to his Nobel prize marked him as an intellect that might well have rivaled Einstein and Von Neumann.
Then Nasar forces us to follow this fascinating man into the terrifying world his illness created for him, where aliens sent him coded messages and where Nash became convinced he was a religious leader sent to save mankind. Watching his descent, it's impossible not to shudder at the realization this could well happen to anyone.
But, through what Nash now argues is his ability to choose not to listen to his paranoid ideations, Nash overcame his schizophrenia and managed to rejoin the mathematical community. Nasar follows Nash back to respectability, and provides a fascinating look behind the scenes of Nobel politics as she examines the circumstances surrounding his prize.
In all, Nasar has created an excellent work that is well-researched, easy to read, and worthy of any reader's time.

Now that the Ron Howard film has been released, it is difficult to review the book on its own merits. Yet this biography is so strong, it can stand on its own. Nasar is an excellent writer who can create excellent pen pictures of life at RAND, MIT and Princeton. She shows great style in creating the environment of the late 1940s and the 1950s. Nash emerges as a complex, demanding and flawed person - an individual. Nash has since refuted the claims of anti-semitism and homosexuality in the book, but it is good to see that Nasar does not side step the issues at all. It is probably prudent to read Nash's comments on the book before making a judgement.
Where Nash is weak is in her descriptions of mathematical formulae. She does not appear to have any real understanding of the mathematics and I would have thought a plain English explanation of his work would have strengthened the biography. I got a little frustrated that she did not tackle this task. Yet it is perhaps a measure of Nash's genius that the ideas are so complex they cannot be easily reduced to a paragraph. Still she could have tried harded in this area. Nasar tends to get around this problem, by getting another expert to describe the brilliance of the idea, rather than the mathemtical idea itself.
Based on my own experiences with people with schizophrenia, Nash's recovery is remarkable and this is the section is probably the most interesting, perhaps because it is so startling. Even after reading the biogrpahy, I still find it hard to believe that someone could recover given the severity of the illness, so it gives some hope to people who suffer this disability and those close to them.
An absorbing biography and close to a great one.

While reading "A Beautiful Mind," I was overwhelmed with the thought of how much work must have gone into this book. Correspondence between several of the main characters is quoted at length, almost every incidental character in Nash's life has been interviewed and included, on almost every page tiny facts about Nash's life are presented as tidbits. This is not to say that Nasar gets caught up in the minutiae of Nash's life; to the contrary I was amazed at how well Nasar has sifted through so much information to present us with a throughly compelling 480 page account.
With the skill of a practiced storyteller, Nasar knows just which facts to present and when to present them. For instance, when it is revealed that Nash misses out on ranking in the top 5 nationally on a prestigious test, Nasar explains (with both analysis and anecdotes) what exactly this meant to Nash and why it is an important part of the narrative. Nasar's ability to separate the important from the trivial is central to the success of "A Beautiful Mind" as it is a quite thorough biography of Nash's life.
The story starts out with Nash's modest upbringing, continuining through to his meteoric rise in academia, his sudden plunge into insanity, and his (hopefully) final return to the academic world he left. Although Nash is larger than life, Nasar does not engage in hero-worship; she presents Nash's life truthfully, warts and all. Additionally, Nasar uses her knowledge to explain important things such as why solving a certain problem was such an important achievement, or how schizophrenia (Nash's affliction) works.
There are two problems I have with this book. Neither of them are substantial, but they do merit mention. First, when Nasar gets into some of the more technical aspects of Nash's life (i.e. his mathematics), her prose can become dry and bulky. This would have been a better book if Nasar had more practice in explaining difficult concepts to the layperson. Second, Nasar's style too often drops into nothing more than a list of events. Although much of this book is infused with excellent narration and much-needed insight, some of it reads like a list of events. Neither of these caveats should undully take away from the excellent job Nasar had done with this book or deter a reader from learning about one of the most interesting men of the 20th century.

Like many other reviewers, I only read "A Beautiful Mind" (ABM) because
of the outstanding movie that very much deserved the awards it won this past
year. After reading the book I have even more praise for the choices the
creators of the movie had to make to condense John Nash's story into a
couple of hours. The movie is serious and thoughtful, for sure, but the real
story of the Nash family makes the movie seem almost tame.
I do not think that a book of this scope can be fairly judged in one
reading, which is why I felt I had to read it twice before writing a review. Overall
ABM is very well written, more than complete, thoroughly researched, compelling, and
interesting historically. ABM also contains many interesting, relevant references to
other books, has poignant quotes from great thinkers like Nietzsche (start of Ch. 17),
and excels when the author uses fictional works by authors like Kafka ("The
Trial," etc.) to illustrate Nash's dilemmas.
It is difficult, for me at least, to separate my reaction to the book from my
reaction to Nash's personality. I found myself getting very angry at parts of
Nash's "inconsistent" personality. One of the best examples can be found on p. 114.
In one paragraph a prominent mathematician "frequently told others that Nash had
greater insight into mathematical structure than any mathematician he had
ever known," while the last paragraph begins, "Some people found Nash absurdly
childish." Over and over we read how Nash is the rare genius who sees the whole
picture, but arrogant in the extreme, and apparently would often have nothing to do
with people whom he does not judge to be at his level. He also wants to be an
academician, but from what I remember is considered a very poor, unfair teacher
in every reference in the book. He fathers a child with a woman whom he does not
marry, and then at least twice she has to force him legally to pay child support.
Ms. Nasar seems to alternate between hero worship (I so tired of reading the
overly detailed descriptions of the afternoon teas at Princeton) and tearing her
hero down, to pieces. Instead of telling us about Nash's faults so often I wish
she had consulted with someone who really understands Nash's vast contributions and
written chapters detailing those - even if some equations had to be presented. She
offers many examples of why Nash surely deserves to win the Nobel Peace Prize,
including numerous compliments by sundry academicians, but again often w/o adequate
details. The discussion of game theory, von Neumann's version vs. Nash's, is explained
well in the prologue, and chapters 9 and 10. Yet I wish she had given one concrete
example of the "Nash equilibrium" - perhaps the FCC auction discussed in Ch. 49 was,
but it is not so stated.
I also compliment the author on her well-researched, balanced discussion of not
only Nash's schizophrenia but on many aspects of mental illness. From what I know
about the subject she covers the topic well, and indeed shows how, like the movie
depicts, Nash's recovery (remission?) is remarkable. For what it's worth, like
Nash, I also have a connection with Roanoke, VA, and mental illness.
If there is a hero in the Nash story, it is undoubtedly his wife, Alicia,
to whom the book is dedicated. Mrs. Nash, a former physics student at MIT who
thinks she has a bright future with a handsome, outstanding mathematician (the book
says "a genius with a ..."), finds herself in a horrible predicament: close
to giving birth to her first child, her husband goes almost completely crazy
in a period of a few months. Though Nash's fellow mathematicians repeatedly
try to find him suitable work, even in the worst periods of his sickness, Alicia
carries the burden of dealing with Nash on a daily basis (other than their
separations), cares for their child (who very sadly ends up suffering from a
worse case of schizophrenia than his father!), and supports the family financially
at the same time. When Nash is suffering through the lowest point in his illness,
c. 1970, with no one else to turn to, Alicia takes him in as a "boarder" (she had
divorced him years before), and provides him a stress-free life so that he can at
least try to work out his problems. If Nash does indeed recover it is Alicia who
deserves much of the credit. I don't think that the speech in the movie actually
happened, where Nash, upon receiving the Nobel, gives his wife the credit for
being his salvation, but it is certainly true to the story in the book. And I
remember Jennifer Connelly saying similar words about Mrs. Nash's
inspiration in her acceptance speech at the Oscar's.
I do recommend "A Beautiful Mind," the movie and the book, but please have
patience and skim where you feel you must!

Initially, I was intimidated by the amount of mathematical theory and high-level concepts that this book presented alongside the life of John Nash, but how can a biography do a mathematical genius justice without it? For those who persevered through the heavily math-laden sections of the text, I think Nasar did a great job making it as accessible as possible for the average reader, like myself.
The story of John Forbes Nash, Jr. is, without a doubt, an intriguing one. As I read along and discovered the difficulties and hurdles associated with schizophrenia I steadily began to wonder what it must feel like, first, to be a genius, second, to be a genius increasingly out of touch with what he loves most. Nash's life was one of isolation, first due to his incredible ability to think, and then because of his outrageous ideas and delusions. His odd little ways, along with his progressively more noticeable mental illness, took away many of the chances at greatness that Nash had always felt were just on the horizon.

The devotion of his wife, Alicia, was Dr. Nash's saving grace at times. Even though she had to separate from him to get a bit of perspective on life and just take a break, she never turned her back on him. Alicia was always willing to help his life and career whenever possible.
It's quite astounding that Nash was able to endure so many years of hellish mental turmoil and come out on the other side to receive one of the greatest of all honors...the Nobel Prize. Throughout the book, I constantly found myself pulling for Nash and longing to give his naysayers a good slap. His mind and his genius are truly beautiful, and I believe Dr. Nash is one of America's greatest treasures. I feel enriched by this story and reminded that all things are possible with determination, support, and perhaps a little good luck thrown in for good measure. Even though the book is difficult at times, give it a go...I don't think you'll regret it.

I understand some minority of readers were dissatisfied with the writing or the details in Sylvia Nasar's book. Please check it our yourself. it does get dense, it does get detailed and that makes it all the better. Seriously, I'm gob-smacked at those who disparage the writing. The writing is elegant, intelligent, and insightful. My only regret is that the book was finished in about 1998, while 15+ years remained in Nash's intriguing life. An unforgettable book.

Sylvia Nasar writes a wonderful biography of the life of John Nash. We see Nash as an unhappy child who finds success in mathematics and becomes both arrogant and self-centered. He sets high goals but falls short failing to win the Fields medal. Yet he makes phenomenal mathematical discoveries and his work in game theory had a major impact in the field of economics. Alicia is a wonderful wife who keeps things together when John starts having his bouts with depression and insanity. At times he is unable to function and then at other times he recovers and shows signs of his former brilliance.

We feel that we understand him. The Nobel Prize in economics would rightfully have been his long ago because of tremendous impact of his equilibrium theory. However, it seems that the Nobel committee is reluctant to award the prize to someone who needs to spend much of his time in a mental institution.

Miraculously Nash recovers in the 1990s and is awarded the prize in 1995. The story is heartwarming and reads like great fiction but it is actually true!

This was made into a well done movie that I also enjoyed very much.

This book had been sitting on my bookshelf for more than a year, more or less since the movie was released. I finally picked it it up this summer and I can't recommend it enough. Whoever said that biographies are boring?
Sylvia Nash includes memories and opinions of a wide variety or people related to Nash's personal and academic life. The maths are difficult to understand, and sometimes I thought that the author went into too much depths to try to explain them, but still, I read these parts with interest. The book is simmering with tension, involving the Cold War, the fierce competition for permanent posts in reknown Amercian universities, and above all John's personal life. Nasar portays Nash as a person you admire but also despise.
As for the portayal of Nash's mental illness, I was also pleased. I was specially surprised about how Nash's family coped with the situation and how his colleagues helped him out with research contracts, during his better periods.
As for the movie, I enjoyed it a lot as well (I had seen it before reading the book), probably because the two are so different that the movie doesn't seem like an adaptation of the book.
Don't be put off by the book's length!!! So far, this is my favorite book this year.

The book A Beautiful Mind is delightfully different than the movie. The movie is accurate in principle, but uses artistic license to make a good story and good visual impact. The book was written by a journalist who did extensive research on the life of John Nash, a famous mathematician who developed paranoid schizophrenia. John Nash, the subject of the biography, didn't get involved in the research at all. So it is based on his written statements, and interviews with almost everyone who knew him. Sylvia Nasar has written a wonderfully detailed, yet always interesting, biography of a deeply complex man. To do this she must have interviewed hundreds of people who knew Nash. Fortunately, the author had the full cooperation of Nash's family and quotes heavily from interviews with them. Ms. Nasar is scrupulous in identifying her sources for everything in the book. The number of footnotes concerned me at first. There are over 2,000 numbered footnotes in the 45 page Notes section at the end of the book. However, these are only to identify the author's sources and seldom contain additional material. So they do not disrupt the flow of the book.
A Beautiful Mind is good on so many levels. It provides wonderful insight into the whole process of becoming a research faculty. It is also a great informal history of 20th century mathematical research. Although there is a some discussion of mathematical theory in the book, it is written for the general reader and should not be problematic for anyone who has an interest in math.
On top of that it is a great biography of a person with a difficult personality and it is a sensitive treatment of schizophrenia. All in all a delightful read if you don't get easily depressed by the tragic illness that changed this man's life.
This paperback edition published in 2001 contains an Epilogue that provides an update on events since the original 1998 edition appeared. As such it is preferable because of the additional information it contains.

The movie was fascinating, but the book far more so. In addition to giving us a detailed biography of Nash, Nasar also creates a vivid picture of the rarefied academic atmosphere at Princeton, MIT and the Institute for Advanced Studies. She captures the feeling of the times, from the immediate post-war era through the Cold War years and McCarthyism. The reader is led to consider questions of sexuality, morality, genius, madness and human nature, as well as game theory and mathematics.
In response to another reviewer's question about something puzzling in the writing, the problem may lie in the way chapters open. In some cases, a chapter seems to begin with an anecdote that is meant to give an overview, a kind of generalization, and then the story backtracks and leads up to that incident. It's a common enough technique, but in places I found it awkwardly handled. But for the most part I found her writing elegant and clear and the incorporation of multiple sources very skillfully done.
One other thought that strikes me is that the possibility of reconstructing someone's life in such detail is interesting in itself. Suppose your life was thought to be of interest to others; could a good researcher put together a biography of you that was far more clear and detailed than even your own memory of it?
If you are interested in math, or psychology, or feminism, or history, or economics, or just humanity, you will find value in this book.
(PS: I just read about Asperger's Syndrome and am inclined to wonder whether this may account for Nash's peculiar behavior prior to his descent into schizophrenia. Nash's apparent arrogance and cruelty may be the result of an inability to understand human interaction, I could speculate.)

Like many, I expect, I read Nasar's biography after seeing the movie, "A Beautiful Mind" (which is, in and of itself, a great movie but don't expect there to be strong congruence between the 2 works). I was compelled to learn more about John Nash's brillance but also his struggle with his mental illness.
Nasar's account does not disappoint on either account.
For math lovers, the book's first third is filled with in-depth discussions of the major ideas Nash worked on. I am not a math person but even I was interested in Nash's ideas, although I didn't fully understand them. Nasar's account of Nash shows the incredible and fine nature of a mind that is truly brilliant even in his most selfish, self-centered moments.
For those more interested in his progressive mental illness and then unexpected "recovery," Nasar also provides ample details that fill the remainder of the book. What the reader comes away with is the tantilizing thought that, perhaps, some forms of schizophrenia (which is what doctors think Nash had) can be cured or at least some schizophrenics can be led back to "normal" reality through on-going, daily contacts with one's work, colleagues, and friends. Without these anchors, I doubt that Nash would've emerged relatively unscathed or ever recovered. Also notable is Alicia Nash's single-minded devotion to John, even when she was most exasperated with him. Her voice and thoughts are missing, which is one of the few problems with Nasar's biography.
The only other fault I have is the constant use of footnotes throughout the book. As a law student, I am used to this, but I prefer my non-law reading to be relatively free of such necessities. If you are reading just for pleasure, the footnotes may be bothersome to you; but if you are reading for research or to learn more, then you will appreciate Nasar's thoroughness.

A very comprehensive biography takes us on a journey from a small West Virginia town where Nash was born to his current state of tentatively sane semi-retirement that he shares with his ex-wife Alicia. This is a biography of one of the most insightful American mathematicians. Nash gave brilliant intuitive and relevant ideas their precise mathematical formulations. The best known of these is Nash Equilibrium. In non-cooperative games (competition only, no coalitions allowed) with perfect information (all possibilities are in principle knowable, even if not in practice known to all competitors) there exists the best strategy leading to a predetermined outcome. This is why games such as chess and checkers are in principle solvable--the outcome is determined even before any moves are made. The reason these games remain interesting (at least at the time of the writing) is because players do not know the most rational strategy and thus make "mistakes," leading to outcomes that are for practical purposes not exactly predictable.
Like many artistic, scientific, and political geniuses, Nash came from a small town and a family that had to struggle finanically. Yet he adopted an aloof and superior approach toward the people he met as a student and later as a mathematician. He was frequently arrogant, aggressive, and inappropriately sarcastic. Morality seemed to him a thinly veiled hypocricy. In this light it is not surprising that Nash admired Nietzsche. Nash behaved rudely and even cruelly toward those who loved him, including his mistress Eleanor (who seems to me to have been his common law wife), his devoted wife Alicia, and both of his sons. I am amazed that after Nash fell desperately ill, many of his colleagues, members of the U.S. government, and his wife remained so loyal, helpful, and concerned.
Nash seems to have recovered from paranoid schizophrenia by the early 1990s and was awarded Nobel Prize in economics. This may have been well deserved, because much of the field of economics has been recast in the language of game theory (cooperative and non-cooperative), and Nash was a key contributor whom no one could ignore, especially after the Nobel Committee decided to focus only on non-cooperative games for its 1994 Prize.
One may find it challenging to feel very sympathetic towards Nash because of his arrogance, unbridled sarcasm, insensitive put-downs, and downright cruelty towards those who cared about him. Many have noted that during his illness Nash was a better person, even if he could not exercise his mathematical faculties much of the time. After his remission, Nash partly reverted to his old ways, speaking cruelly to his elder son John Stier who tried to reestablish the relationship, and occasionally hurting Alicia with his stupid verbal behavior. Given Nash's personality, it is not surprising that he made the great discovery of the so-called equilibrium that bears his name. Nash abolished players--their emotions, their preferences, their entire psychology, all gone! Only the game remains. Games have solutions, people who play them do not count in arriving at these solutions. The man who was a mathematical genius and who lacked empathy and compassion was fortuitously positioned to arrive at that important formulation.
The book is not just interesting, but sometimes gripping. The only minor flaw is that occasionally characters are introduced into the narrative out of the blue, followed by a strangely detailed description of theier appearance and behavior, even when it is not obvious why such a detailed description is necessary. This makes the book a bit choppy. But overall this is an enjoyable, provocative, and educational read. I recommend the book.

Anyone wanting to read this book in search of anecdotes from the movie will be disappointed. John Nash was a socially challenged genius, a mathematician from West Virginia who went to Princeton, a paranoid schizophrenic, and a Nobel Prize winner. The book and the movie share those broad story lines. However, none of the details in the story match up.

Ms. Naser manages to write a biography that creates sympathy for a man who in many ways is not terribly likeable. Even before the evident onset of Professor Nash's disease, he was socially difficult, childish, and arrogant, while also being brilliant. His romantic encounters and fathering of children were self-centered and harmful to others. Even so, one cannot help but feel sad for the sense of loss that Profeessor Nash felt over the years and the opportunities wasted. Anyone who has either lost years to illness or bad decisions, or who has known someone who has done so, can feel the ache of that sense of loss.

The sections on Professor Nash's mathematical accomplishments are necessary to indicate the level of his brilliance in his field, but will be largely incomprehensible for those who have not engaged in the field. Even so, this is a book that can be enjoyed by the general reader.

With this book, Sylvia Nasar has made a contribution the list of great books about mathematical ideas and their impact on the larger world (for others, see, for example, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers", and "Fermat's Last Enigma"). What struck me, besides the book's considerable merits, among them being a good story exhaustively researched, and well told, was how much of this will be overshadowed by the Oscar-winning movie adaptation.
How many members of the Academy had read this book before casting their Best Picture votes? I would submit, very few indeed. Although the movie has some fine points (the lovely Jennifer Connelly, a decent performance by Russell Crowe, and a nice visual look), it so distorts the story as to turn it into a work of fiction. Others have detailed these descrepancies in greater detail than I have the time, patience, or space for, but just to name two very obvious ones will suffice - the delusional fantasy of the college roommate and his daughter, a key, if not central, element of the movie, is a complete falsehood; and the hokey, if emotionally satisfying, speech at the Noble Prize ceremony is another Hollywood add-on that struck me as false even before I read this fine book. In any event, read the book - it has plot twists and turns enough, without fictional embellishments, and deserves its own audience, and for that matter, enjoy the movie, too - as a fictional work based very, very loosely on the truth.

Sylvia Nasar's biography of John Nash, Jr., A BEAUTIFUL MIND, is an easier book to recommend than to read, strange as that may sound. It may be the first such work which I feel actually suffers from over-research. The names of obscure mathematicians, physicists, theorists, and sundry Princetonians crowd nearly each and every page, a torrent of pronouns raining down until one starts to get that lost-in-a-crowd feeling. Nasar would have done better (and trimmed the page count nicely) had she concentrated more intensely on the half-dozen or so really important people in Nash's life instead of taking us for this long escalator journey where so many dim ghosts are met only in passing.

Unlike many, I read the book, then saw the movie. Ron Howard's film is far more concerned with Nash's disease, paranoid schizophrenia, than with Nash. Huge blocks of Nash's life are, understandably, left out--his premarital affair resulting in a son he never cared for, his apparent bisexuality and often bizarre relationships with other men his age, a sure propensity for mental cruelty, and so on. Nasar's Nash, especially the younger man, is bloodless, cold, unfeeling. The more words Nasar employed to discover something human and constant in her man, the more I was convinced she would never find any.

Yet, there is something extraordinary at work here. Something that keeps you there for this long and often confusing and contradictory ride through the perils and boredom of high academia, genius, and madness. It's a common belief that genius and madness must always be close neighbors if not cohabitors. In his Nobel autobiography, John Nash observes: "Without his 'madness,' Zarathustra would necessarily have been only another of the millions or billions of human individuals who have lived and then been forgotten." Maybe that's it.

A Beautiful Mind is truly a compassionate biography, if not the best, among the many I have read, certainly among the very best. Some years ago there was in The New York Times an article you wrote about John Nash. I saved it for I found it intriguing. Thus, when the opportunity came to have a copy of your book, I took it without second thoughts. It should be required reading for psychology courses. Those preparing to be teachers should be required to read it. There is so much in the book that intrigued me, and I shall read it again to absorb more. That John Nash intuitively determined answers to math problems, and then figured out the methods of getting there was enlightening, for this was true for me in geometry and in a doctoral-level statistics course. No one I knew did that. How very frustrating it must have been for John Nash when he could not perform his mathematical functions. What a tremendous tragedy, not alone for him and his family, but for all of us. That others are building on his work is gratifying. However, would it not be wonderful if he achieved another milestone. Thank you, Sylvia Nassar, for providing us with the gift of A Beautiful Mind. Sincerely, Sally Ann Vervaeke Helf

Sylvia Nash chronicles the story of John Nash's descent from fame as a mathematician working in some of the most prestigious universities in the United States to the bizarre world of the schizophrenic and then back out into becoming a Nobel Prize in Economics recipient. With painstaking precision and tons of footnotes, she began with Nash's family history and proceeded through Nash's life up to the present, never thinking twice about presenting any fact which may be disagreeable to some readers in an effort to present Nash's life as clearly as possible. Her work is not only a credit to non-fiction writing but is also one step in the right direction to help the public see mental illness as something other than an affliction to be shunned. She shows that under the layers of a malfunctioning psyche, John Nash is a real human being. Although the book contains many facts about mathematics that are beyond my understanding, presenting them lends credibility to the fact that John Nash has, not only a beautiful, but also a great mind.

My reaction to seeing the film was to wonder what got left out. So I bought the book. And what got left out of the movie was just about everything. The screenplay is a fantasy, prettied up for public consumption. Granted, film is another medium, one in which compression and simplification dominate. A book allows for expansion, in-depth explanation and exploration of character, all of which author Nasar delivers with meticulous research, effective prose, and sympathy. As someone who was beyond dismal in mathematics in school, I pay Nasar the greatest compliment in saying that she managed to make the incomprehensible accessible to me. More importantly, this is a book on the human level about friendship, loyalty and the toll mental illness takes on everyone involved. Her portrait of Nash is clear-eyed, unvarnished, and all the more fascinating because of it. That a man might be possessed of a beautiful mind and yet have little to no social graces is a difficult concept to make palatable. Yet she succeeds in making us care about this man, in spite of his extraordinary personal flaws and failures. It is not easy reading, but it is important, worthwhile reading for the insights it offers not only into the arcane realm of the mathematical mind but also into the state of a mind altered by mental circuitry gone awry. Most highly recommended--particularly for those who've seen the film and, like me, wondered about the truth of John Nash.

A very interesting book about John Nash, the mathematician who extended John von Neumann's work on game theory into the realm of multi-player games.
It is also an interesting look at Nash's schizophrenia, his descent into madness and his slow struggle to emerge from it. This element of the book is probably its best part; the chapters about how the spectral Nash haunted Princeton in the 1970s and 1980s as he slowly recovered his rationality are particularly fascinating. The book is very well written and readable.
My criticism of it is basically on two minor counts: first, the book doesn't give enough information on the importance of John Nash's work on the study of economics, and therefore one is not sure where Nash's work stands in the scheme of things; second, the young Nash is a somewhat unsympathetic character and without the perspective of his relative importance or unimportance, one doesn't know how to judge this. Was he a jerk who advanced mankind's knowledge significantly or was he just a jerk?
Overall, though, the book is very good.

The correct title of the book should be, IMHO, "A
(Mathematically) Beautiful Mind", because I donot think
John Nash got a beautiful mind at all.:-)
I was surprised by Hollywood's ability to produce the
wonderful movie, inspired by John's life (More accurately,
by the book.) Most of the details in the movie got wrong,
according to the book. But it's wrong beautifully. John
himself said, he felt relieved that the John in the movie
was not him. (Nevertheless, he got paid for the use of his
name in the movie.) The movie team tried to promote better,
humanistic attitude to those who get mental illness. It's
great, even if the details are not right.
Most mathematicians think that his work on non-corporative
game theory, which won his the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics,
is trival, comparing with his pure mathematical works. He
himself was not sure whether this piece of work (in less
than 30 pages) would be enough for him to get his Ph.D. in
math from Princeton. But as far as I know, he is the only
Nobel Prize laureate in economics whose work challenged Adam
Smith; most of them simply extended Smith's ideas. Some of
them are really bad.
Reading the book is an exciting experience (I read most of
them when riding trains between home and office, which were
the highlights of my last 14 working days.) There are 45
pages of endnotes (in small fonts), and it's kind of annoying
to turn to the endnotes several times for every page of the
text you read. I wish there were a footnote version. Also,
you will not learn a lot of John's mathematics in the book;
the author published another book, "The Essential John Nash"
for that.
Surprising things I learned from the book: (1) The Institute
for Advanced Study was mainly funded by owners of a department
store in New Jersey; (2) The famous logician Godel had got
refusal for a membership in the Institute for many years;
and (3) Forget about trading stocks, even John lost most of
his mother's money in the market:-).

Nash was really lucky, for being helped by his colleagues.
Also his wife played a critical role in his recovering from
his madness. The book is correctly dedicated to John's wife,
a live testimony to a famous cliche, "Behind every great man
there's a great woman." (Also a Feminist slogan; Days ago, I
found a cushion on my sofa, and read another Feminist slogan,
"Behind every great woman there's herself." It's good that
we can get an excuse for not being great; but donot expect
to get any credit for their success, guys!:-))

It's amazing that he missed his well deserved Fields Medal
in mathematics because of his madness, but waked up in the
right moment to receive his Nobel in economics. (Fields is
an award which is widely regarded as Nobel Prize in mathmatics,
but unlike the Nobel Prize, the candidates get to be under
40 years old, and surprisingly, the prize attached the Fields
is just around $$$. A Nobel is around $$$. Disregard
the money, I still think a Nobelist, even the one in economics,
is more immortal than a Fieldsian. Who really cares about or
understands those pure mathematicians' works anyway?:-)

Finally, the book is more interesting than most novels, and
you will not regret for every penny you spend in buying the
book and every minute reading it.

This 1998 biography of the famous mathematician John Nash (born 1928) was made into a movie "A Beautiful Mind" in 2001. The movie starred Russell Crowe who did a superb job portraying Nash. The book cover that was on my copy was a special release to coincide with the movie release. I decided to read this book because I remembered how much I enjoyed the movie. The book of course goes into much finer detail than was possible in the movie.

The book covers Nash's entire life up to 1998 (the publication date). The movie focused on just the portion of his life when Nash suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Both the book and movie describe Nash's miraculous recovery.

Nash had an amazing mind for doing higher math problems. He was flashy, arrogant, condescending and a general nuisance to those around him. He is what we would describe today as a child prodigy. As with many child prodigies, Nash suffered from the inability to relate to others socially. He had an inflated ego. We can all admire such a man for his abilities. Yet we also shrink back from his negative qualities.

The onset of Nash's mental illness came at about age 30 (1958). This is unfortunate because Nash was doing very important work at the time. This was the height of Nash's career and his most productive time. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. It is a debilitating disease causing delusional thinking. The paranoid variety causes the person to think he is being persecuted by others. Nash was hospitalized several times during the 1960's and 70's. Gradually Nash improved and the disease seemed to have gone into remission by 1995. He was gradually able to produce work again, yet after the illness, Nash was a humbled man.

What caused the illness? Experts still don't know. The disease is still actively studied to this day. Psychiatrists are able to prescribe better medicines now compared to the 1960's. Unfortunately, many of those who suffer from it end up committing suicide. Others never recover. About 10-25% of patients who do recover are eventually able to lead a normal life. Many times, the disease causes reduced mental ability after remission. In Nash's case, he was able to beat the odds. His mental ability was not diminished to any significant degree. He retained the ability to work on difficult math problems even in his 60's and 70's.

I took this book as a cautionary tale; it reminded me of several lessons from scripture. First is that we should be thankful for our blessings. We never know when the blessings we take for granted will be removed from us. I was also reminded that it really does matter how I treat others. If I have a prideful spirit, I can really hurt others and I will suffer from poor relationships. We need to be humble. If we are gifted in some way, we can do much good, yet that good can be muted by our poor attitude.

It was gratifying to see that by the end of the book, Nash learned from his mistakes. He did persevere through suffering. He allowed his family and friends to help him during his illness. It was an up and down struggle, but he made it through with their help.

I would recommend this book. It is entertaining, interesting and will lead us to reflect on our own struggles. Hopefully we will gain a better appreciation of what those who suffer from mental illness go through. I think that one lesson is worth the book.

Very entertaining biography of a genius mathematician, and a bully. There are almost no biographies that capture the true life of the subject. The companion movie is a good example of this common omission. This book is one of the rarities, very well describing why this person deserves a biography (mathematical achievements are adequately described to tantalize those capable of following up) and honest about the subject as a person. I don't want to know this much about people around me, but I applaud the author for telling the whole story of John Forbes Nash, Jr. It gave me another definition for what it means to be human, and we are all human.

There has been a great deal of comparison between the book and film versions of A Beautiful Mind. I read the book, then saw the movie, and the changes, often seemingly gratuitous, are jarring. But my husband and son, "uncontaminated" by a previous reading, both thuoght it a very good movie. Each tells the truth, one with an obviously more literal meaning of "truth" (i.e., the book), but if anyone out there bleieves all written biographies to be pure truth, please come check out some bridges I have for sale.
Nonethelesss, the book's truth is also the more complex one, and is so in a way I have only seen indirectly treated. The book's treatment of the academic world is quite dense, and perhaps often unnecessarily so, but it really is the central story. I don't see Nash's story as primarily a love story, although obviously that is an important part of his story. I see the academic story as central, and in very different and complicated ways.
First, it was the competitiveness and arrogance of the academic elite that undid Nash, his own personality complicit in his downfall. But secondly, his own personality again, and the very same elite academic community, as tolerant of oddity as it is competitive, facilitated Nash's long road to recovery. Schizophrenics retain their personalities within their illness; finding safe niches matter to all of them, and is the challenge in today's move to community placement of schizophrenics. Nash was a pioneer in Game Theory first, and then a pioneer in his own successful community placement. His genius, his beautiful mind, need the full telling only a book can provide. Nash is not only a schizophrenic Nobel Laureate, but a member of the academic community.
His is quite a tale. Only a book can truly tell it.

This schizophrenogenic book is distressing and depressing. The complex sentence structure gives most paragraphs a dual personality, and perhaps it is best that the book reads this way. Improved wordage and punctuation would make the book a lot easier to read, but then we wouldn't appreciate the loose association that comprises schizophrenia.
The mini-editorial comment about the Vietnam War tends to taint the veracity of the author's observations, and the suggestion that Al Gore almost invented auctions for telecommunication frequencies is superfluous to the game theory discussion that follows. The implied relationship between forceps deliveries and a schizophrenic genius is not justifiable, but that commentary helps us understand the author's mindset.
I would be hesitant to recommend this book to those who are interested in mathematics as a career, as it paints a very bleak picture for this profession in general. It is excellent reading for residents in psychiatry, and students in social work and psychology as a case study of a mathematical prodigy. It accurately depicts the politics of academia, and delves into the method of Nobel Prize selection, which is very interesting.
I read the book because I've always liked mathematics, and the geniuses described in this book made me realize how really stupid I am. I came away from the book feeling very normal and relieved that I was not a mathematical prodigy or possessed a photographic memory. I have yet to see the movie, but I doubt that Hollywood can adequately depict the tragic life of John Nash without the addition of dramatic fantasy to create a moneymaking venture.
The content and construction of this book is great for capturing the mood of schizophrenia. I was ready to start on Risperdal at its midpoint and overjoyed to be out of the asylum when it was over.

This book is sensational. It is because of the quality of the book that an Oscar winning picture was made out of a rather obscure subject. Yet, as many said it before, the book is far richer and deeper than the movie ever was.
There are entire decades of Nash life that the movie glossed over. One such example is when he went on several European trips, in the midst of his psychological crisis, and wanted to become a citizen of the World by renouncing his US citizenship. This never made it in the movie. And, how could it. The movie was already long as is.
Also, Nash social life is far richer and (clinically strange) than the movie ever made it out to be. At one point, he is courting his future wife, his current girlfriend, and a boyfriend all at the same time. This never made it in the movie either. Russell Crowe was not big on conveying the gay stuff. But, let there be no doubt, Nash was bisexual big time.
Nash is a far more perplexing, multi dimensional character in the book than he ever was in the movie. Yet, I loved the movie. I gather that tells you I really enjoyed this book.

This biography of John Nash was the basis for the movie A Beautiful Mind (which is a wonderful film, go see it). Nash was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 1994 for his contributions to game theory. He also suffered from schizophrenia. Of course as a psych major I am intrigued by the stigma associated with mental disorder that is prevalent in this book. Nash did most of his work in the 50s and 60s. We still don't know very much about mental disorders and people knew even less when Nash was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Although this book is occasionally dry with talk about specific mathematic equations and technical theories, you don't need to understand all that stuff to really enjoy the book. I loved it. I saw the movie first, which was definitely a good thing because the book and the movie are a lot different. Although the movie strays quite a bit from the actual facts and events of Nash's life, I think it still captures the essence of his experiences and portrays him as the "crazy" genius that he was.