‘Beautiful Mind’ author speaks

Within the span of one decade, mathematician John Nash went from being one of the most promising minds in mathematics and economic theory to being committed to a mental hospital. Thirty-five years after that, he accepted the Nobel Prize in Economics.

When journalist Sylvia Nasar learned about Nash’s award, it began a three-year-long process of investigating and chronicling his rise, fall and re-emergence. She eventually shared his story in articles in The New York Times and her biography “A Beautiful Mind.”

Nasar, who was the final speaker in the School of Journalism Spring Speaker Series, spoke Tuesday in Alumni Hall.

“The life of John Nash is the story about an individual’s triumph over incredible adversity,” Nasar said.

By his mid-20s, Nash already held a Ph.D. in mathematics from Princeton, and by his 30s, he was an MIT professor, husband and expecting father. He was seen by many as “a celebrity in the rarified world of mathematics,” Nasar said.

“His modus operandi was to take a complex problem and pursue a strategy that people who knew something about the field found absurd,” she said.

But by 1959, Nash was so consumed by mental illness that he was committed to McLean Hospital outside of Boston and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
“When Nash got sick, science was primitive, as was treatment,” Nasar said.

“Basically, they were told mental illness was the result of bad mothers and bad wives.”
For several decades, Nash fell out of the world of mathematics and economics, but his work in game theory gained legitimacy.

In 1994, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. Nasar’s biography of Nash was published in 1999 and made into a movie, which won four Oscars in 2001.

Though freshman Shanti Knight said she came to Nasar’s speech for a class, she said she loved Nasar’s conversational tone and thought the speech was “fantastic.”

“I’m not good at math, but I consider myself to have a creative mind,” Knight said. “She made math a creative subject.”

Nasar said knowing how to recognize a good story was the reason she was able to find out about all of John Nash – beyond his mental illness.

“A zillion people knew the facts of Nash’s story, including some reporters,” Nasar said. “To most, it seemed like a scandalous or depressing or obscure kind of story. But that’s not what this story is about. This is the story of an ugly duckling.”