A Beautiful Mind - Sylvia Nasar
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Superbly written and eminently fascinating.- The Boston Globe
In this biography, Sylvia Nasar re-creates the life of a mathematical genius whose brilliant career was cut short by schizophrenia and who, after three decades of devastating mental illness, miraculously recovered and was honored with a Nobel Prize. A Beautiful Mind traces the meteoric rise of John Forbes Nash, Jr., from his lonely childhood in West Virginia to his student years at Princeton, where he encountered Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and a host of other mathematical luminaries. At twenty-one, the handsome, ambitious, eccentric graduate student invented what would become the most influential theory of rational human behavior in modern social science. Nash's contribution to game theory would ultimately revolutionize the field of economics. At thirty, Nash was poised to take his dreamed-of place in the pantheon of history's greatest mathematicians. Then Nash suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown Nasar details Nash's harrowing descent into insanity - his bizarre delusions that he was the Prince of Peace; his resignation from MIT, flight to Europe, and attempt to renounce his American citizenship; his repeated hospitalizations, from the storied McLean, where he came to know the poet Robert Lowell, to the crowded wards of a state hospital; his "enforced interludes of rationality" during which he was able to return briefly to mathematical research. At age sixty-six, twin miracles - a spontaneous remission of his illness and the sudden decision of the Nobel Prize committee to honor his contributions to game theory - restored the world to him. Nasar recounts the bitter behind-the-scenes battle in Stockholm over whether to grant the ultimate honor in science to a man thought to be "mad." She describes Nash's current ambition to pursue new mathematical breakthroughs and his efforts to be a loving father to his adult sons.
About the author (2001)
Sylvia Nasar was born in Bavaria in 1947 to a German mother and Uzbek father. Her family emigrated to the United States in 1951 and lived in New York and Washington, DC, before moving to Ankara, Turkey, in 1960. In 1965, she returned to the USA and attended Antioch College where she majored in literature. After working for several years, she entered the PhD programme in Economics at New York University, completing a Master's degree in 1976. For a time, she did economics research, including with Nobel Laureate Wassily Leontief. At the age of thirty-five Nasar became a journalist. Since 1983 she has been a writer at Fortune, a columnist at US News & World Report and a reporter at the New York Times where she currently covers economics. A Beautiful Mind, her first book, was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and the Helen Bernstein Book Award.
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