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What it argues
Sylvia Nasar's biography of the mathematician John Nash — Nobel laureate, game theory pioneer, and paranoid schizophrenic — is one of the finest accounts of genius and mental illness in biographical literature. Published in 1998, it traces Nash's improbable trajectory from a brilliant and arrogant graduate student at Princeton in the late 1940s to three decades of psychosis, institutionalization, and social invisibility, and finally to a late-life emergence, recovery, and the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994.
The early chapters establish Nash's mathematical gifts and his personality's more troubling dimensions. He was visibly contemptuous of colleagues, careless of other people's feelings, and sexually unconventional in ways that generated considerable institutional anxiety in 1950s America. His contributions to mathematics — the Nash equilibrium in game theory, his work on manifolds and partial differential equations — were made in a concentrated burst of about five years and were of sufficient depth that other mathematicians are still unpacking them. Nasar explains the mathematics accessibly without condescending; she is genuinely interested in the ideas, not just the biography.
What it gets right
- 1.
Mathematical genius and social dysfunction can coexist not just incidentally but structurally. Nash's most significant work was produced during a period of extreme personal difficulty.
- 2.
Paranoid schizophrenia does not erase the person inside it. Nash remained recognizably himself — arrogant, curious, unconventional — even during the worst periods of his illness.
- 3.
Alicia Nash's loyalty is one of the biography's most complex moral subjects. Her decision to stand by Nash was neither simple selflessness nor simple codependency.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Sylvia Nasar is an American journalist and economist who served as economics correspondent for The New York Times before joining the faculty at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. A Beautiful Mind, her first book, was published in 1998 and became a bestseller. She spent four years researching it, conducting hundreds of interviews with Nash's colleagues, former patients, and family members. The book was adapted into a 2001 film directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Nasar subsequently published Grand Pursuit: The Story of Economic Genius.
