..but an ugly personality! (A Beautiful Mind - Sylvia Nasar)

Member Name: phoebe1

Product:	A Beautiful Mind - Sylvia Nasar
Date:	01/08/03 (568 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Dispenses with the Hollywood hype, Good insights into mental illness, Maths is cool

Disadvantages: Not an easy read, If you liked the film this will spoil it for you, Too many notes

A Beautiful Mind is the biography of John Nash, the mathematical genius whose work on game theory provided a new basis for modern mathematical economics. At the age of thirty-one he suffered a mental breakdown and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

If you haven't yet seen the film then I would recommend you read the reviews here on dooyoo by sandrabarber and lookaroundcafe2, which eloquently summarise my own opinion on this movie. The book lifts the lid on the true story of the man, stripping away the romanticized Hollywood treatment, and the person described here could not be more different to the character played by Russell Crowe.

Biographer Sylvia Nasar, a former economics correspondent for The New York Times, has recounted his life in chronological order. As a boy he was socially awkward, introverted, lacked friends and withdrew into his own world. His handwriting was atrocious and his teachers labeled him an underachiever. At nine years old his worst subjects were maths and music - but his best friends were books, of which there was a plentiful supply at both his parents' and grandparents' houses.

His gift for maths began to manifest itself in his unorthodox approach - he threw out the rule books and always looked for different ways to do things. As a young adolescent he gained immense satisfaction from devising mathematical proofs which were elegant and brief, compared to the lengthy methods his teachers employed.

Nash's teenage years were not easy due to non existent-social skills, and his peers found him weird. John's pastimes included torturing animals and rigging up sophisticated circuits to deliver electric shocks to unsuspecting children.

At the age of 15, Nash and a couple of neighbouring boys started fooling around with homemade explosives. This all came to a tragic end when one of them, experimenting alone, had a pipe bomb explode in his lap, severing his intestinal artery and
causing him to bleed to death. Strangely, the author makes no more mention of this incident, and I was left wanting to know of the impact this had on the young John. Anyone who watched the excellent programme on Paul Gascoine recently will have learnt how a traumatic episode in adolescence can trigger mental illness. Although Nasar tries to provide other reasons later on in the book for his mental collapse, the glossing over of this incident is a major flaw.

At College, Nash's originality in maths continued to shine, but fellow students sensed he had a mental problem. Only his size saved him from having the crap beaten out of him. The other guys, afraid of his strength, chose instead to ostracise him.

John exposed himself (see below!) to further ridicule when he became attracted to other boys, and his popularity continued to plunge due to his displays of contempt for anyone he considered to be his intellectual inferior - which took care of everyone.

But as his reputation for being a genius grew, he did attract a following of sorts, especially amongst those who came to him for help with homework.

Photographs of Nash in the book certainly back up one student's description of him being 'handsome as a god', and I would have cast Brendan Fraser as him, if only he could act, since the resemblance is uncanny. But his personality was deeply unattractive. Frankly, he was an obnoxious, arrogant git who wanted to establish that he was smarter than anyone else, and who was always ready with an insensitive put-down. Oh, and a racist and anti-semite too.

What cannot be disputed is the extraordinary way John acquired knowledge. Nobody remembers seeing him with a book during his graduate career, he rarely attended classes, his handwriting was now almost unreadable with misspellings as a result of dyslexia, and he had to have lined notepaper. But he learned through conversations and by attending visiting lecturers. And
he did spend an awfully long time just thinking, which is key to solving any maths problem.

At the age of twenty, Nash began his studies at Princeton, where he rubbed shoulders with scientific legends Einstein and John von Neumann, the man considered by many to be the most brilliant mind of the twentieth century. Nasar provides an informative account on the history of maths and physics around this time, and it is easy to see how Princeton had become a hothouse for mathematics at the time of Nash's arrival.

Nasar paints an illuminating picture of the surroundings and lecturers of Princeton, reminding me strangely enough of Hogwarts and its inhabitants. For example, Steenrod, whose lectures were 'exciting but 90 percent wrong', and the constant stream of board games such as chess, go and Kriegspiel, played with alarming competitiveness and aggression in the common room.

John's interest in games led him to request an audience with Von Neumann, the father of Game Theory, and a clash of heads created the competitive edge which spurred the younger man on, at the age of twenty-one, to produce his thesis which became known as the 'Nash Equilibrium Theory'. Its significance on economic, social science and biological theory wasn't recognized at the time, even by Nash.

Nash's growing reputation as a genius saw him recruited by the secretive RAND (research and development) Corporation in Santa Monica in 1950. Here he was privy to secrets at the height of the Cold War, the Korean War and the era of McCarthyism. Nasar skillfully evokes the fear of ordinary Americans during this period, and the atmosphere of paranoia could only have helped to unsettle John's already fragile mind. Whilst her attention to detail is impressive, she commits a glaring error by placing Bletchley Park, the place where Alan Turing and his team broke the Nazi code 'on England's southern coast'. As any fule kno, the old que
en was beavering away in Milton Keynes, hardly a seaside resort.

John put elaborate plans into action to make sure he avoided the draft for the Korean War. It wasn't that he was a pacifist, but his personality found the notion of regimentation and close contact with strangers highly threatening. His efforts eventually reached delusional proportions when he carried on avoiding conscription long after the war, and the draft, had ended. Nash, however, partly blamed the onset of his illness on the stress of teaching.

He started teaching, aged twenty-three, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where, by today's standards he would easily have failed any classroom observation. His teaching methods amounted to malpractice, and putting classic unsolved problems on exams was a favourite trick. Whilst not wishing to support this methodology, I do admire his explanation of "Maybe, if people didn't realize that the problem was 'hard', they could solve it". Undergraduates voted with their feet, however, and his class size dropped from thirty to five students. Nash continued to display his genius in research and produced some truly inspired work (on manifolds in topology, but I don't expect you to understand that dear reader!).

At the age of twenty-four he finally found a girlfriend in Eleanor Stier, a nurse, but kept her a secret whilst simultaneously flaunting at least three affairs with other men. His treatment of Eleanor was unforgivable - when she gave birth to their son he offered no financial help. Eleanor lost her job and her home, and was forced to put their child into foster care. The separation from her son nearly drove the poor woman mad, and I think this illustrates what a low emotional IQ Nash had. He wouldn't entertain marriage as he didn't view her as intellectually worthy.

His liaisons with men cost him dearly. In an incident mirroring another (musical) genius, George Mic
hael, he became the victim of a police entrapment operation in a public toilet and was charged with indecent exposure. Now considered a security risk, he was fired from RAND.

Back working at MIT, a student became infatuated with John. She was bowled over by his good looks and began to study him to the point of hero worship. Having found out that he played chess and was a science fiction fan, Alicia learned chess and read up on science fiction. Rather than the paragon portayed in the film, Alicia admits that she saw John as a route to the academic ambition that her very mediocre talents could never achieve. Her full on courtship of John finally resulted in their marriage and she quickly became pregnant.

It was at this time that Nash suffered his sudden and catastrophic breakdown. The many reasons given for it include the death of his father, a spurned homosexual affair, failure to win a maths prize, impending fatherhood and his attempts at resolving the contradictions in quantum theory, which he referred to as 'psychologically destabilizing'.

Nasar gives a sympathetic account of his descent into madness, and I found his behaviour proved what a thin line there can be between tragedy and farce. For example, he told of receiving encrypted messages from aliens, and he also claimed he was on the cover of 'Life' magazine, only his picture had been disguised to make it look as if it were Pope John the Twenty-third (whom it was!). The strain on Alicia was immense, and eventually she had John committed. The details of the available treatments for schizophrenia are both fascinating and gruesome, yet John seems to have been treated humanely at all times -'One flew over the cuckoo's nest' it ain't.

As a measure of the stress Alicia was under, their baby remained nameless for his first year of life. He was eventually and imaginatively called John (just as his first son was). The delusions continued and Nash be
came obsessed with world government and world citizenship, writing strange letters in green ink and seeking refugee status in Europe.

Unable to cope with his mental illness any longer, Alicia divorced John, who was to spend the next thirty years of his life behaving strangely within the safe confines of the Princeton campus. As the years passed, many young researchers presumed he was dead, although his Equililbrium Theory was now widely taught and respected.

Nash's remission from his illness was, in contrast to its onset, a very slow process. The author affords us plenty of insights into how and why it happened. My favourite is given by Nash himself, who compares keeping a check on his paranoid thoughts to dieting. Just as someone wishing to lose weight has to decide consciously to avoid certain foods, it was a matter for him of policing his thoughts and recognizing and rejecting the irrational ones.

Friends who felt that John had never achieved the academic recognition he deserved brought his work to the attention of the Swedish Nobel Committee, who eventually awarded him a shared Nobel in economics in 1994. Rather than give away the ending, if you read the book you will discover if Nash behaved himself at the ceremony, if he ever reconciled with Alicia, and whether he lives a normal life now.

THE VERDICT

The book stands head and shoulders above the film; Nasar has generally done her research well (apart from the couple of errors I mentioned).There are fifty pages of notes in the back supporting the text, which for the most part source interviews, books and letters. My advice would be to completely ignore these and you will lose nothing in the reading, indeed you will gain from an uninterrupted flow of the narrative.

There are times when Nassar loses sight of her audience, for instance, '... first transforming the nonlinear equations into linear equations and then attacking these by linear methods'
. Confused? Well you would have to possess some kind of advanced level knowledge of maths for that to mean anything to you. And that was quite a mild example! But please do
n't let this put you off the book- if you simply skim these bits you will lose little of the story.

The book is as much about mental illness as genius and although we gain some insights, I think Nasar could have gone further. Perhaps it's just me, but I sensed a nasty elitist intellectual undertone implying that Nash's breakdown was all the more tragic because he was a genius. I would have liked her to point out that the cerebrally challenged suffer from schizophrenia too, and the effects are just as devasting on them and their loved ones.

She would also have benefited from being a little more circumspect. Having been immersed in this book for the best part of two weeks, it is easy to come away with the impression that all geniuses will eventually crack up, and that all mathematicians are weird.

I did find it hard to like Nash, and was not surprised to learn that he was estranged for twenty years from his first son, and from his sister for 25 years. A friend described him as being a nicer person after his illness, but I don't fully agree with this. A reunion with his elder son saw him critisising him for being fat (which he wasn't) and on his choice of profession, nursing.

Tragically, his younger son by Alicia has suffered from paranoid schizophrenia for over twenty years, supporting the gentic link theory. John Jr's welfare now takes up a large part of their life.

The book received much critical acclaim and was a finalist in the Pulitzer Prize. I would give it four stars, although three and a half would be more accurate. Occasionally, Nasar's intention to remain objective can make for dull reading. She does border on being intellectually intimidating in her style of writing. It is not an easy read, but I would recomme
nd it to anyone with an interest in maths, science, modern history and mental illness.

Browsing through the critics' reviews, my favourite has to be from the Wall Street Journal hack who describes it as ' ... a three handkerchief read'. I can honestly say there was nothing that moved me to tears in this book, and I am usually a big softie. Or maybe there is a different interpretation of this quote ....

A Beautiful Mind is available from www.amazon.co.uk in paperback for £7.99 +p&p.
Publisher: Faber and Faber; ISBN: 0571212921

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