A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar PDF

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A Beautiful Mind
Sylvia Nasar (Author)
Paperback: 464 pages
Publisher: Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (July 12, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1451628420
ISBN-13: 978-1451628425



Book Description
Release date: July 12, 2011
“HOW COULD YOU, A MATHEMATICIAN, BELIEVE THAT EXTRATERRESTRIALS WERE SENDING YOU MESSAGES?” the visitor from Harvard asked the West Virginian with the movie-star looks and Olympian manner. “Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did,” came the answer. “So I took them seriously.”
Thus begins the true story of John Nash, the mathematical genius who was a legend by age thirty when he slipped into madness, and who—thanks to the selflessness of a beautiful woman and the loyalty of the mathematics community—emerged after decades of ghostlike existence to win a Nobel Prize for triggering the game theory revolution. The inspiration for an Academy Award–winning movie, Sylvia Nasar’s now-classic biography is a drama about the mystery of the human mind, triumph over adversity, and the healing power of love.

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Stories of famously eccentric Princetonians abound--such as that of chemist Hubert Alyea, the model for The Absent-Minded Professor, or Ralph Nader, said to have had his own key to the library as an undergraduate. Or the "Phantom of Fine Hall," a figure many students had seen shuffling around the corridors of the math and physics building wearing purple sneakers and writing numerology treatises on the blackboards. The Phantom was John Nash, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his generation, who had spiraled into schizophrenia in the 1950s. His most important work had been in game theory, which by the 1980s was underpinning a large part of economics. When the Nobel Prize committee began debating a prize for game theory, Nash's name inevitably came up--only to be dismissed, since the prize clearly could not go to a madman. But in 1994 Nash, in remission from schizophrenia, shared the Nobel Prize in economics for work done some 45 years previously.
Economist and journalist Sylvia Nasar has written a biography of Nash that looks at all sides of his life. She gives an intelligent, understandable exposition of his mathematical ideas and a picture of schizophrenia that is evocative but decidedly unromantic. Her story of the machinations behind Nash's Nobel is fascinating and one of very few such accounts available in print (the CIA could learn a thing or two from the Nobel committees). This highly recommended book is indeed "a story about the mystery of the human mind, in three acts: genius, madness, reawakening." --Mary Ellen Curtin --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Nasar has written a notable biography of mathematical genius John Forbes Nash (b. 1928), a founder of game theory, a RAND Cold War strategist and winner of a 1994 Nobel Prize in economics. She charts his plunge into paranoid schizophrenia beginning at age 30 and his spontaneous recovery in the early 1990s after decades of torment. He attributes his remission to will power; he stopped taking antipsychotic drugs in 1970 but underwent a half-dozen involuntary hospitalizations. Born in West Virginia, the flamboyant mathematical wizard rubbed elbows at Princeton and MIT with Einstein, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener. He compartmentalized his secret personal life, shows Nasar, hiding his homosexual affairs with colleagues from his mistress, a nurse who bore him a son out of wedlock, while he also courted Alicia Larde, an MIT physics student whom he married in 1957. Their son, John, born in 1959, became a mathematician and suffers from episodic schizophrenia. Alicia divorced Nash in 1963, but they began living together again as a couple around 1970. Today Nash, whose mathematical contributions span cosmology, geometry, computer architecture and international trade, devotes himself to caring for his son. Nasar, an economics correspondent for the New York Times, is equally adept at probing the puzzle of schizophrenia and giving a nontechnical context for Nash's mathematical and scientific ideas.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Those who enjoyed the compelling story of John Nash as presented in the Academy Award-winning film may wish to know more about the real mathematical genius. This audiobook will give the listener a deeper insight into Nash's mind a mind that fired with flashes of intuition, that saw the answers first and then worked out their proofs, a mind that came to believe that aliens from outer space were sending him messages. A Beautiful Mind tells the story of a man who faces the greatest foe of that genius schizophrenia. It's about the horrors that Nash endured at the hands of the psychiatric profession and in the grip of his delusions. It also relates how Nash was helped by his colleagues at Princeton and his wife, Alicia, and how perhaps this stability and sheltering care allowed him to rationalize away his delusions. An enthralling tale, masterfully performed by Edward Herrmann. Highly recommended for all libraries. Theresa Connors, Arkansas Tech Univ., Russellville
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From The New England Journal of Medicine
It is a common belief that once schizophrenia has bored its way deep into a person's mind, the losses are irretrievable. But over the past decade or so, many patients have had their lives greatly enhanced by the new antipsychotic medications; others, admittedly few, improve in midlife without any treatment whatsoever. One person who seems to have had a substantial midlife improvement is Professor John Nash, who was first brought to the general public's attention by Sylvia Nasar in a 1994 New York Times article. Not only was Nash improving after having been severely ill with paranoid schizophrenia for 30 years, but also he had just won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his stunningly original contributions to game theory. Knowledge of his successful struggle with psychosis brought hope to the millions of people with schizophrenia, their families, and those involved in their care. It also raised intriguing questions about the relation between mental illness and creativity.
Although artistic imagination has been associated, often controversially, with madness for thousands of years, there are now at least twenty studies demonstrating that the increased rates of mental illness in highly creative groups are almost invariably due to manic-depressive illness or other forms of mood disorders. No empirical studies have linked schizophrenia with creativity. Generally, if people with severe forms of schizophrenia have creative ideas, the illness is too debilitating for the creativity to be expressed in a productive, coherent, or sustained manner. Yet on rare occasions, important and original thinking may come from some aspects of schizophrenia. There are people, with less severe or atypical forms of the illness, who see the world in a way it has not been seen before. And rarely, when the world that they can understand is, in turn, newly understood and appreciated by others, we acknowledge that it has been created by genius.

In A Beautiful Mind, Nasar tells the painful yet ultimately remarkable story of Nash and the world around him. Nash, although always a person given to isolation, appears to have won the fierce loyalty of a surprisingly large number of people. The most important of these, his former wife, Alicia, continued to care for him during his many years of psychotic breakdowns, despair, and intellectual isolation.

On one level, Nash's story is a historical road map of some of the most important scientific scenes of this century. Post-World War II Princeton and its Institute for Advanced Study was home to an extraordinary collection of minds and personalities, including those of Albert Einstein, Kurt Godel, Robert Oppenheimer, and John von Neumann. The last, with his collaborator Oskar Morgenstern, had developed a systematic mathematical description of games as an approach to rational thinking about economics. They described the zero-sum, two-person game that assumes total conflict or "perfect competition." In their model there was, of necessity, a complete winner and a complete loser. In essence, they described an all-out war between the participants.

Challenged by the flaws and gaps in this approach, Nash, then a first-year graduate student, developed various approaches to the "bargaining problem." How do parties bargain or compromise to solve a problem? We strike deals out of self-interest. His thinking and the mathematical foundation of his work became, in turn, the foundation of much of modern theoretical and experimental economics. It was Nash's notion that spawned what later became known as the problem of the "prisoner's dilemma."

Neither Nash's work nor his personal life was able to progress smoothly. Within a few years, he was overtly psychotic. Nash had always been odd, but over time, his behavior became increasingly bizarre and inappropriate. His mullings became utterly incomprehensible, and his actions disturbingly erratic. His delusions and hallucinations were severe, and he was involuntarily committed to psychiatric hospitals on several occasions. The severe symptoms of his schizophrenia lasted 30 years. But gradually, those who knew him noted that he was improving.

It was perhaps no coincidence that the Nobel prize committee, which, not unlike the United States Supreme Court, deliberates in rather arcane secrecy, began at this time considering his past achievements for the highest honor in economics. Nasar, with admirable sleuthing and tenacity, was able to delve into the politicking surrounding the deliberations of the committee. Full of intrigue, the committee became an arena for principle, stubbornness, personal persuasiveness, and not surprisingly, extraordinary pettiness. Although being a bit mad was certainly no disqualification for receiving the Nobel prize, it was quite another thing to award it to a man who was very mad and who could easily embarrass himself or, more disconcertingly, the Nobel Foundation. To the committee's credit, it did award the prize to Nash, who immediately demonstrated his rationality: the afternoon he received the Nobel prize he commented that he hoped it would improve his credit rating.

Nasar has written an intriguing account of a fascinating man, of a "beautiful" mind, and of terrible madness. She has also written a deeply moving love story, an account of the centrality of human relationships in a world of nightmare and genius.

Reviewed by Richard J. Wyatt, M.D.
Copyright © 1998 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved. The New England Journal of Medicine is a registered trademark of the MMS. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist
Rarely has the fragility of the boundary separating genius from madness been illustrated with more compelling insight than in this biography of John Nash, a Nobel laureate in economics and one of this century's greatest mathematicians. Untangling the strands of this perplexing life requires the rare author who can explicate the complex rationality of differential calculus and also plumb the bizarre illogic of schizophrenia. Nasar identifies the earliest signs of a prodigy in the sloppy and introverted child who played with magnets and found shortcuts for doing fourth-grade arithmetic. She diagnoses the first symptoms of mental instability in the MIT scholar who astonishes the world with his bold solutions to impossible problems. And she detects the first stirrings of recovery in the pathetic specter wandering the halls of Princeton. To fully appreciate Nash's career accomplishments, readers must have some grasp of advanced mathematics. But Nasar tells the story of a great mind broken and then healed with subtle sympathy, which will touch any reader who understands what it means to hope--or to fear. Bryce Christensen --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Kirkus Reviews
A biography about a mathematical genius who suffered from schizophrenia, miraculously recovered, and later received the Nobel Prize in 1994. Nasar, an economics correspondent for the New York Times, opens her book with the spectral image of John Forbes Nash Jr., who haunted the Princeton University campus where he had once been a promising graduate student. Nash, the son of conservative southern parents, rose rapidly through the ranks of equally brilliant mathematicians during the 1950s. Then, at the age of 31 and at the height of his career, Nash experienced the first of many breakdowns and was later diagnosed with schizophrenia. Nasar attempts to write an ambitious biography. It is, on one level, an in-depth look at this mysterious figure and his milieu and, on another level, a meditation on the nature of genius and madness. On the first level, Nasar succeeds, providing a sense of the rarefied and competitive atmosphere of mathematics departments in the nation's leading universities during the height of the Cold War. The peripheral characters of the book are vividly drawn, and episodes in Nash's life are painted with an extraordinary attention to detail. She also presents advanced mathematical theories in an accessible and palatable way. However, her efforts to get at the heart of Nash's disease fall short. A great deal of speculation is made about his early childhood, his homosexual liaisons, and his arrest for solicitation in this pre-Stonewall era. And even more is made of his bizarre and generally antisocial behavior before the breakdown. By the time Nasar reaches Nash's first psychotic episode, the reader is struck, not by his genius, but by his maladjusted behavior. By the end of the book, Nash remains as much of an enigma as he was before. Impressively researched and detailed, but still fails to shed much light on the mysteries of genius and insanity. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
The New York Times Reads like a fine novel.

Oliver Sacks Deeply interesting and extraordinarily moving.

The Boston Globe Superbly written and eminently fascinating.
About the Author
Sylvia Nasar is the author of the bestselling A Beautiful Mind, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. She is the John S. and James. L Knight Professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Prologue
Where the statue stood
Of Newton with his prism and silent face,

The marble index of a mind for ever

Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

-- WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

John Forbes Nash, Jr. -- mathematical genius, inventor of a theory of rational behavior, visionary of the thinking machine -- had been sitting with his visitor, also a mathematician, for nearly half an hour. It was late on a weekday afternoon in the spring of 1959, and, though it was only May, uncomfortably warm. Nash was slumped in an armchair in one corner of the hospital lounge, carelessly dressed in a nylon shirt that hung limply over his unbelted trousers. His powerful frame was slack as a rag doll's, his finely molded features expressionless. He had been staring dully at a spot immediately in front of the left foot of Harvard professor George Mackey, hardly moving except to brush his long dark hair away from his forehead in a fitful, repetitive motion. His visitor sat upright, oppressed by the silence, acutely conscious that the doors to the room were locked. Mackey finally could contain himself no longer. His voice was slightly querulous, but he strained to be gentle. "How could you," began Mackey, "how could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof...how could you believe that extraterrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world? How could you...?"

Nash looked up at last and fixed Mackey with an unblinking stare as cool and dispassionate as that of any bird or snake. "Because," Nash said slowly in his soft, reasonable southern drawl, as if talking to himself, "the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously."

The young genius from Bluefield, West Virginia -- handsome, arrogant, and highly eccentric -- burst onto the mathematical scene in 1948. Over the next decade, a decade as notable for its supreme faith in human rationality as for its dark anxieties about mankind's survival, Nash proved himself, in the words of the eminent geometer Mikhail Gromov, "the most remarkable mathematician of the second half of the century." Games of strategy, economic rivalry, computer architecture, the shape of the universe, the geometry of imaginary spaces, the mystery of prime numbers -- all engaged his wide-ranging imagination. His ideas were of the deep and wholly unanticipated kind that pushes scientific thinking in new directions.

Geniuses, the mathematician Paul Halmos wrote, "are of two kinds: the ones who are just like all of us, but very much more so, and the ones who, apparently, have an extra human spark. We can all run, and some of us can run the mile in less than 4 minutes; but there is nothing that most of us can do that compares with the creation of the Great G-minor Fugue." Nash's genius was of that mysterious variety more often associated with music and art than with the oldest of all sciences: It wasn't merely that his mind worked faster, that his memory was more retentive, or that his power of concentration was greater. The flashes of intuition were nonrational. Like other great mathematical intuitionists -- Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, Jules Henri Poincaré, Srinivasa Ramanujan -- Nash saw the vision first; constructing the laborious proofs long afterward. But even after he'd try to explain some astonishing result, the actual route he had taken remained a mystery to others who tried to follow his reasoning. Donald Newman, a mathematician who knew Nash at MIT in the 1950s, used to say about him that "everyone else would climb a peak by looking for a path somewhere on the mountain. Nash would climb another mountain altogether and from that distant peak would shine a searchlight back onto the first peak."

No one was more obsessed with originality, more disdainful of authority, or more jealous of his independence. As a young man he was surrounded by the high priests of twentieth-century science -- Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener -- but he joined no school, became no one's disciple, got along: largely without guides or followers. In almost everything he did -- from game theory to geometry -- he thumbed his nose at the received wisdom, current fashions, established methods. He almost always worked alone, in his head, usually walking, often whistling Bach. Nash acquired his knowledge of mathematics not mainly from studying what Other mathematicians had discovered, but by rediscovering their truths for himself. Eager to astound, he was always on the lookout for the really big problems. When he focused on some new puzzle, he saw dimensions that people who really knew the subject (he never did) initially dismissed as naive or wrong-headed. Even as a student, his indifference to others' skepticism, doubt, and ridicule was awesome.

Nash's faith in rationality and the power of pure thought was extreme, even for a very young mathematician and even for the new age of computers, space travel, and nuclear weapons. Einstein once chided him for wishing to amend relativity theory without studying physics. His heroes were solitary thinkers and supermen like Newton and Nietzsche. Computers and science fiction were his passions. He considered "thinking machines," as he called them, superior in some ways to human beings. At one point, he became fascinated by the possibility that drugs could heighten physical and intellectual performance. He was beguiled by the idea of alien races of hyper-rational beings who had taught themselves to disregard all emotion, Compulsively rational, he wished to turn life's decisions -- whether to take the first elevator or wait for the next one, where to bank his money, what job to accept, whether to marry -- into calculations of advantage and disadvantage, algorithms or mathematical rules divorced from emotion, convention, and tradition. Even the small act of saying an automatic hello to Nash in a hallway could elicit a furious "Why are you saying hello to me?"

His contemporaries, on the whole, found him immensely strange. They described him as "aloof," "haughty," "without affect," "detached," "spooky," "isolated," and "queer." Nash mingled rather than mixed with his peers. Preoccupied with his own private reality, he seemed not to share their mundane concerns. His manner -- slightly cold, a bit superior, somewhat secretive -- suggested something "mysterious and unnatural." His remoteness was punctuated by flights of garrulousness about outer space and geopolitical trends, childish pranks, and unpredictable eruptions of anger. But these outbursts were, more often than not, as enigmatic as his silences. "He is not one of us" was a constant refrain. A mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study remembers meeting Nash for the first time at a crowded student party at Princeton:

I noticed him very definitely among a lot of other people who were there. He was sitting on the floor in a half-circle discussing something. He made me feel uneasy. He gave me a peculiar feeling. I had a feeling of a certain strangeness. He was different in some way. I was not aware of the extent of his talent. I had no idea he would contribute as much as he really did.
But he did contribute, in a big way. The marvelous paradox was that the ideas themselves were not obscure. In 1958, Fortune singled Nash out for his achievements in game theory, algebraic geometry, and nonlinear theory, calling him the most brilliant of the younger generation of new ambidextrous mathematicians who worked in both pure and applied mathematics. Nash'S insight into the dynamics of human rivalry -- his theory of rational conflict and cooperation -- was to become one of the most influential ideas Of the twentieth century, transforming the young science of economics the way that Mendel's ideas of genetic transmission, Darwin's model of natural selection, and Newton's celestial mechanics reshaped biology and physics in their day.

It was the great Hungarian-born polymath John von Neumann who first recognized that social behavior Could be analyzed as games. Von Neumann's 1928 article on parlor games was the first successful attempt to derive logical and mathematical rules about rivalries. Just as Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand, great scientists have often looked for clues to vast and complex problems in the small, familiar phenomena of daily life. Isaac Newton reached insights about the heavens by juggling wooden balls. Einstein contemplated a boat paddling upriver. Von Neumann pondered the game of poker.

A seemingly trivial and playful pursuit like poker, von Neumann argued, might hold the key to more serious human affairs for two reasons. Both poker and economic competition require a certain type of reasoning, namely the rational calculation of advantage and disadvantage based on some internally consistent system of values ("more is better than less"). And in both, the outcome for any individual actor depends not only on his own actions, but on the independent actions of others.

More than a century earlier, the French economist Antoine-Augustin Cournot had pointed out that problems of economic choice were greatly simplified when either none or a large number of other agents were present). Alone on his island, Robinson Crusoe doesn't have to worry about others whose actions might affect him. Neither, though, do Adam Smith's butchers and bakers. They live in a world with so many actors that their actions, in effect, cancel each other out. But when there is more than one agent but not so many that their influence may be safely ignored, strategic behavior raises a seemingly insoluble problem: "I think that he thinks that I think that he thinks," and so forth.

Von Neumann was able to give a convincing solution to this problem of circular reasoning for games that are two-person, zero-sum games, games in which one player's gain is another's loss. But zero-sum games are the ones least applicable to economics (as one writer put ... --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From AudioFile
Edward Herrmann continues to add to a great body of work, including television, theater and feature films, with his narration of mathematician John Nash's life. With his commanding voice, Herrmann traces Nash's life from his "normal" childhood to his mathematical genius to his mental decline from schizophrenia in this abridgment of Nasar's riveting biography. Herrmann's unbiased reading of Nash's strong personality and egotistical nature keeps the listener from disliking Nash for his indifference to those around him, yet Herrmann brings the listener full circle with his thoughtful and philosophical reading of Nash as an older and wiser man. Herrmann manages to keep a great perspective on Nash's actions and his mental illness, providing a good, solid reading of the life of a genius. H.L.S. © AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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