Authors: Sylvia Nasar
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Mathematics, #Science, #Azizex666, #General
A Beautiful Mind (2 page)
36: Day Breaks in Bowditch Hall (
McLean Hospital, April–May
1959
)
37: Mad Hatter’s Teas (
May–June
1959
)
38: Citoyen du Monde (
Paris and Geneva,
1959–60
)
39: Absolute Zero (
Princeton,
1960
)
40: Tower of Silence (
Trenton State Hospital,
1961
)
41: An Interlude of Enforced Rationality (
July
1961–
April
1963
)
42: The “Blowing-Up” Problem (
Princeton and Carrier Clinic,
1963–65
)
44: A Man All Alone in a Strange World (
Roanoke,
1967–70
)
45: Phantom of Fine Hall (
Princeton,
1970s
)
46: A Quiet Life (
Princeton,
1970–90
)
49: The Greatest Auction Ever (
Washington, D.C.,
December 1994
)
50: Reawakening (
Princeton,
1995–97
)
Foreword
(Adapted from remarks at John Nash’s 80th birthday Festschrift)
I
N
J
UNE
2006, I went to St. Petersburg to track down the forty-year-old mathematician who had solved the Poincaré Conjecture. Reputedly a hermit with wild hair and long nails who lived in the woods on mushrooms, he was up for a Fields Medal and a $1 million cash prize but had gone into hiding, not just from the media but from the math community. Meanwhile, some folks in Beijing were claiming that they’d beaten him to the punch. It was a great story — if only we could find him.
After four frustrating days in Russia, my colleague and I hadn’t found a soul who had seen or talked to the guy or his family in years. Then, when we had pretty much thrown in the towel, we stumbled on his mother’s apartment more or less by accident and, voilà, there was the “hermit,” dressed in a sports jacket and Italian loafers, evidently having lunch and watching soccer on TV.
He gestured for us to sit down and explain what we wanted.
“My name is Sylvia Nasar,” I began. “I’m a journalist from New York and I’m working on …”
He interrupted: “You’re a writer?”
I nodded.
“I didn’t read the book,” he said, “but I saw the movie with Russell Crowe.”
The point is that, no matter where in the world you are, you’d have to be a
real
hermit not to know the inspiring story of John Nash.
There are lots of stories about the rise and fall of remarkable individuals. But there are very few stories, much less true stories, with a genuine third act. Nash’s story had — has — such a third act. Act III of Nash’s life story is his miraculous reawakening.
It is that third act that makes Nash’s story resonate with people all over the world — most especially with those who suffer from devastating mental illnesses or love someone who does.
At one point in the movie, when it looks as if things were all over for Nash, his wife, Alicia, takes John’s hand, places it over her heart, and says, “I have to believe that something extraordinary is possible.”
Something extraordinary
was
possible.
Of all the letters I’ve received from readers, my favorite came from a homeless man. It arrived in a dirty envelope with no return address, and it was scrawled on neon orange paper. It was signed “Berkeley Baby.” It would never have made it past the
New York Times
mailroom after the anthrax scare.
The letter writer turned out to have been the night rewrite editor on the metro desk at the
New York Times
before he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia
in the mid-1970s. Since then, he had adopted the name Berkeley Baby and lived on the streets of Berkeley, California, near the university, a forlorn, sad figure not unlike the Phantom of Fine Hall.
He wrote, “John Nash’s story gives me hope that one day the world will come back to me too.”
The world came back to John Nash after more than thirty years, and it was the third act of his life that drew me to his story in the first place. In the early 1990s, I was an economics reporter at the
New York Times
. I was interviewing a Princeton professor about some trade statistics when he mentioned a rumor that a “crazy mathematician” who hung around the math building might be on the short list for a Nobel prize in economics. “You don’t mean the Nash of the Nash equilibrium?” I asked. He told me to call a couple of people in the math department to learn more. By the time I put down the phone, I realized that this was a fairy tale, Greek myth, and Shakespearean tragedy rolled into one.
I didn’t write the story immediately. Lots of people wind up on short lists for the Nobel and never win, so writing about him in a newspaper would have been an invasion of privacy. In any case, someone else got the prize in 1993. The next year, however, I saw Nash’s name in the Nobel announcement. I ran over to my editor to pitch the story and actually made him cry.
It was a difficult story to get. Nobody who knew any facts was willing to go on the record or even talk to me. Martha Legg, Nash’s sister, finally broke the silence about the nature of the illness that had wrecked his life.
Lloyd Shapley, another pioneer of game theory, described Nash as a graduate student in the late 1940s, when he wrote his seminal papers on game theory: “He was immature, he was obnoxious, he was a brat. What redeemed him was a keen, logical, beautiful mind.
So now you know to whom I owe the title of the biography.
Because Nash’s story is so familiar, I’d like to share some of the less familiar parts, including how the book came to be and some of the things that happened after the book and movie broke off.
In June 1995, I found myself in Jerusalem. By then, I had written a book proposal, gotten a publisher, and was about to spend a year at the Institute for Advanced Study. Unfortunately, I’d never met my subject or exchanged more than a few words with him on the phone. When I found out that Nash was going to a game theory conference in Jerusalem, I thought I’d go too.
Some will remember what Nash said about John von Neumann, who had given him some of the worst advice ever given to a doctoral student. Fortunately, Nash had ignored von Neumann’s advice. Unfortunately for me, he had also decided to ignore the advice of many of his friends and supporters to cooperate with his biographer.
“Dear Mrs. Nasar,” a typical note began. “I have decided to take a position of Swiss neutrality …”
Everyone knows the phrase “It takes a village.” It had taken someone weeks
of dogged reporting to put together a six-line CV and a short list of Nash’s publications. It took hundreds of sources to piece together his whole story. No single individual, not even Alicia or his sons, knew the whole story.
It turned out to be possible to stitch together thousands of bits and pieces — gathered from hundreds of interviews, dozens of letters, and a smattering of documents — into a narrative. It worked partly because the mathematics community is like a Greek chorus — watching, commenting, remembering, filling in the background, explaining the action.
But ultimately it worked because John Nash was always a star and, all his life, people around him couldn’t take their eyes off him, couldn’t stop thinking about him. How many of us, years from now, will live as brightly in the memories as he has for so long … and long before the fairy tale ending.
And, of course, it worked because Alicia never stopped believing that something extraordinary is possible. She wanted his story told because she thought it would be inspiring for people with mental illnesses.
A friend once asked Nash where Alicia was. John answered “Having dinner with Sylvia.” After a pause, he added, “I hope they aren’t talking about me.”
Actually, Alicia was extremely protective of Nash’s privacy and incredibly discreet. There was only one exception: we were in the basement of her bank, sifting through the contents of her safety deposit box looking for photos. She came across these little 2 x 2 snapshots of her and John with Felix Browder at the UC Berkeley swimming pool. That was the beefcake shot that convinced Graydon Carter not to kill the book excerpt in
Vanity Fair
. (Brian Grazer told me he’d bought the rights to the book because Graydon told him to.)
Alicia was holding the picture and chuckling: “Doesn’t he have the
greatest
legs?!”
Nash never did agree to give me an interview for the book.
Post-publication meetings between biographers and their living subjects, authorized or not, often take place in lawyers’ offices. Ours did not.
Instead, we met at a Broadway play,
Amy’s View
, starring Judi Dench. Nash told us that it was his first Broadway play. He and Alicia liked
Proof
better. I was sitting behind them and could see their shoulders shaking with laughter. David Auburn, the playwright of
Proof
, told me that he got the idea of turning the sisters into daughters of a mad mathematician from John’s story.
Watching someone get his life back is an incredibly sweet experience — even little things like driving again or having coffee at Starbucks. When I asked Nash, for a
New York Times
story about Nobel prize winners and how they spent their prize money, how the prize had affected his life, he said, well, now he could buy a $2 cup of coffee at Starbucks. “Poor people can’t do that,” he’d observed.
Watching someone get his life back and in the process touch the lives of millions of people is equally remarkable. People have told me that they’ll never again pass someone on the street with matted hair and filthy clothes who’s shouting at the air without telling themselves that he or she is someone’s child or sibling, someone with a past, and maybe someone, like John Nash, with a future. That’s the power of stories.
• • •
The first time I went to the movie set, Ron Howard was filming the wedding scene on the Lower East. All the principals were there because a
New York Times
reporter was going to interview us all.
I met Akiva Goldsman, the screenwriter without whom the movie would never have been made, much less won an Oscar. It was Goldsman’s brilliant idea to have the audience see the world through Nash’s eyes for the first half of the movie. Stepping into Nash’s shoes and then having the rug pulled out from under them, the movie audience was not only drawn into the story but experienced what it’s like not to be able to distinguish between reality and delusion.
After Ron Howard screened the movie for John and Alicia, I called them. “So, John, what did you think?”
I don’t remember all of his exact words, but I do recall that he mentioned liking three things:
First of all, that it was funny.
Second, John being an action movie fan, that the pacing was fast.
Third …
“I think Russell Crowe looks a little like me.”
Just in case you think Nash was kidding himself, at a Q&A with Ron Howard at New York University’s film school, some mathematicians from the Courant Institute came up to Ron Howard to tell him that John Nash actually had looked like Russell Crowe in the white T-shirt scene.
The movie turned Nash into a celebrity. I was on a flight to Mumbai where I was meeting Amartya Sen, also a Nobel laureate in economics, at a game theory conference. The woman to my left had just asked me why I was going to India when the flight attendant came by with an Indian newspaper, and there was a photograph of John Nash, the keynote speaker, on the front page, right next to one of Sen. All I had to do was to point. In Mumbai, as in Beijing and other places he was invited to speak, he was mobbed by hundreds of reporters and well-wishers.
Nash’s story appealed to children and teenagers who were thrilled by the notion that someone really young — and quirky — could accomplish amazing things and outsmart the older generation. And it made math seem cool.
Dear Mr. Nash,
Hi! I am 9 years old. My name is Ellie. I am a girl. I really admire you. You are my roll [
sic
] model for a lot of things. I think you are the smartest person who ever lived. I really wish to be like you. I would love to study math. The only problem with that is that I am not very good at math. I can do it. I like it. I am just not good at it. Was that what it was like for you when you were a kid? Please write back. Love, Ellie