A Beautiful Mind Characters

Mackey is a Harvard professor and friend of John Nash who visits Nash in the hospital in the spring of 1959. Mackey expresses astonishment that Nash believes his paranoid delusions (about “extraterrestrials” sending him messages) to be true.

Steenrod is a Princeton math professor who becomes John Nash’s “sounding board” during Nash’s years as a graduate student. Steenrod believes that Nash’s ideas are “mathematically interesting and important”—a rare feat for a young graduate student.

Emil Artin is one of the math faculty members at Princeton while John Nash is a graduate student there. He strongly opposes Nash’s appointment as a professor at Princeton after he finishes his PhD, believing Nash to be “aggressive, abrasive, and arrogant.”

Gale is one of John Nash’s fellow graduate students, with whom Nash collaborates on a game that becomes popular among the math students (which the two called “Nash” or “John”).

Williams is a member of the RAND think tank who helps to recruit mathematicians, including John Nash, for the organization, and oversees research operations there.

Donald Spencer is a Princeton math professor who helps John Nash to develop his theorem on manifolds, a type of geometric object.

Harold Shapiro is a RAND mathematician John Nash works with in summer 1952.

Hincks is a college friend of John Nash’s sister, Martha, who travels with Nash, Martha, and John Milnor to Santa Monica in the summer of 1952. Nash tries to set Hincks and Milnor up, but their romance fizzles out.

Thorson is an applied mathematician with whom John Nash develops a “special”—likely romantic—friendship in Santa Monica. Nash often referred to Thorson as “T” in letters in the late 1960s, more than a decade after they met, suggesting the lasting importance of their brief affair.

Moser is a math faculty member at MIT with whom John Nash begins to collaborate in the late 1950s, forming an “intense” bond. Nash and Moser develop the “Nash-Moser theorem” together, combining Nash’s method for embedding manifolds (a type of geometric object) with Moser’s expertise in celestial mechanics.

Calabi is a graduate student in mathematics at Princeton during John Nash’s years there, though he is not close friends with Nash. In 1959, Calabi delivers a lecture at MIT, attended by Nash, who begins to interrupt Calabi, making nonsensical comments; Calabi quickly realizes that Nash is mentally ill.

Emma Duchane is one of Alicia Nash’s college friends at MIT who helps Alicia as Nash begins to unravel mentally, straining their marriage.

Robert Lowell was a famous poet who was hospitalized at McLean Hospital with John Nash in 1959. Lowell and Nash spend “a good deal of time” together at McLean; Lowell could often be found delivering “monologues” to other patients from Nash’s room, while Nash stood by quietly.

Mele is a psychiatrist at the Carrier Clinic, where John Nash is hospitalized in 1963. He plays an “important and positive role” in Nash’s life, providing Nash with therapy sessions and overseeing his recovery.

Harsanyi and Selten, both mathematicians who worked on game theory, were the co-recipients of the 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, along with John Nash.

Bleuler was a Swiss psychiatrist who coined the term schizophrenia, the disease from which John Nash suffered, in 1908, to denote “a specific type of alteration of thinking, feeling and relation to the external world”—an illness often characterized by delusions and extreme personality changes.