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A fascinating portrait of Nobel laureate, John Forbes Nash, Jr., who laid the groundwork for a transformation in the field of economics.
In this powerful and dramatic biography Sylvia Nasar vividly re-creates the life of a mathematical genius whose 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., a prodigy and legend by the age of thirty, who dazzled the mathematical world by solving a series of deep problems deemed "impossible" by other mathematicians. But at the height of his fame, Nash suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown and began a harrowing descent into insanity, resigning his post at MIT, slipping into a series of bizarre delusions, and eventually becoming a dreamy, ghostlike figure at Princeton, scrawling numerological messages on blackboards. He was all but forgotten by the outside world -- until, remarkably, he emerged from his madness to win world acclaim. A feat of biographical writing, A Beautiful Mind is also a fascinating look at the extraordinary and fragile nature of genius.
The dramatic story of John Forbes Nash, Jr., a mathematical genius who slipped into madness at the height of his career, endured three decades of schizophrenia, and, after a miraculous recovery, was awarded the Nobel Prize for his groundbreaking work. of photos. Index.Review Quote
Richard Jed Wyatt & Kay Redfield Jamison The New England Journal of Medicine 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.Review Quote
Robert S. Boynton Newsday A triumph of intellectual biography...The fact that a man capable of conceiving a nuanced theory of rationality could then descend into madness givesA Beautiful Mindan exquisite sense of dramatic tension.Review Quote
Ted Anton Chicago Tribune This dense, carefully researched work is also, unexpectedly, a poetical love and coming-of-age story.Review Quote
Charles C. Mann The Wall Street Journal After suffering with Mr. Nash's family through his madness, the reader greets his recovery -- and his ability to reforge a bond with his wife -- as a triumph...A Beautiful Mindis one of the few scholarly biographies I have encountered that could plausibly be described as a three-handkerchief read.Review Quote
Keith Devlin New Scientist Nash's life has been a remarkable mental journey. Nasar's first-rate biography describes that journey for us.Review Quote
Claire Douglas The Washington Post Book World A fascinating overview of [Nash's] life and the intellectual history of his times...a wonderfully absorbing puzzle.Review Quote
David Goodstein The New York Times [Sylvia Nasar] has written a biography of John Nash that reads like a fine novel.Review Quote
Marcia Bartusiak The Boston Globe [A Beautiful Mind]might be compared to a Rembrandt portrait, filled with somber shadows and radiant light effects...superbly written and eminently fascinating...simply a beautiful book.Review Quote
Michael J. Mandel Business Week A fascinating account of creativity barely under control, of a mathematical genius who was driven by -- and eventually overwhelmed by -- his own inner demons. A staggering feat of writing and reporting.Review Quote
Simon Singh The New York Times Book Review A Beautiful Mindtells a moving story and offers a remarkable look into the arcane world of mathematics and the tragedy of madness.Excerpt from Book
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
Sylvia Nasar, an economic correspondent for the New York Times, is the author of A Beautiful Mind. The book is a biography of mathematical genius John Forbes Nash, Jr. Nasar's book details, his rise, decline into mental illness, recovery, and winning of the Nobel Prize for Economics.