A Beautiful Mind: Prologue Summary & Analysis

John Nash is sitting in a hospital lounge with a visitor, also a mathematician, George Mackey, on a weekday afternoon in May 1959. Mackey asks Nash how he, as a mathematician, “a man devoted to reason and logical proof,” could believe that extraterrestrials were sending him messages. Nash looks directly at Mackey and says that the ideas he had about extraterrestrials came to him “the same way” his ideas about math did, and as a result, he “took them seriously.”

Over the course of a decade, from the late 1940s to the late 1950s, Nash, a man from Bluefield, West Virginia, became “the most remarkable mathematician of the second half of the century.” Nash’s genius as a mathematician was similar to the genius of artists: he experienced “visions” about mathematical problems that allowed him to construct solutions, though the methods he used for these solutions remained mysterious to others who tried to follow them. Nash was also highly independent and “disdainful of authority.” He did not follow other mathematicians and preferred to subscribe solely to his own brand of “rationality and the power of pure thought,” hoping to turn all of life’s decisions, no matter how big or small, into “calculations of advantage and disadvantage.”

Nash’s contemporaries found him “immensely strange,” and his aloof manner set him apart from his peers. Yet his achievements in game theory, algebraic geometry, and nonlinear theory—applicable to understanding dynamics of human rivalry—were some of the most significant ideas of the 20th century. John von Neumann, the Hungarian-born mathematician, paved the way for Nash’s ideas as the first academic to suggest that human behavior could be analyzed as a game, using poker as a point of comparison. Nash postulated that games could be solved when every player chose a response that he or she thought was the best response to the other players’ best strategies. This is the basis of the Nash equilibrium, which forever changed the guiding principles of economics.

By his late 20s, Nash was a successful mathematician: he was also married and a father. But like other famous scientists and philosophers—Descartes, Wittgenstein, Kant, Newton, Einstein—he had a solitary, detached personality, the kind that is often attributed to genius. However, “men of scientific genius, however eccentric, rarely become truly insane.” Nash was an exception. When he turned 30 and went up for tenure as a professor at MIT, he began to experience schizophrenic episodes. He eventually resigned his position and was committed to a psychiatric institution, the first of numerous hospitalizations throughout his life.

Schizophrenia was first described in 1806, but its origins in the human mind are uncertain. 1% of the population in the world suffers from the disease, though it is unclear whether schizophrenia develops from hereditary or environmental factors, or a combination of the two. Eugen Bleuler coined the term “schizophrenia” in 1908 to refer to the “splitting of psychic functions”: those who are schizophrenic experience delusions and hear voices, among other psychotic symptoms, though the severity of these symptoms varies wildly from person to person. Many schizophrenia sufferers have been “people with fine minds,” and some even experience episodes of mental “heightening.” Indeed, at the beginning of his illness, Nash believed “he was on the brink of cosmic insights.”

In the 1970s and 1980s, Nash became a “phantom” who haunted Princeton, New Jersey, where he settled (and where he had obtained his PhD), often writing obscure equations on classroom blackboards after hours. At the same time, his work on game theory was becoming influential in the field of economics; many mathematicians and economists assumed that the “Nash” of the “Nash equilibrium” was dead. Yet Nash was also beginning to show signs of recovery. He interacted with other Princeton mathematicians at the Institute for Advanced Study, a research center also based in Princeton, and corresponded with famous mathematicians by mail, tentatively venturing back into the world of research.

In 1994, after attending a Princeton math seminar (Nash was regularly invited to these seminars, though he was not technically affiliated with the university), Nash’s close friend, Harold Kuhn, a Princeton math professor, told Nash that he could expect a phone call from the Swedish Academy of Sciences the next day, informing him that he had won a Nobel Prize.