My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Throughout history, genius has oftentimes been associated with madness. Figures such as Pablo Picasso are famous in the popular imagination for this. During of the 20th century, John Nash, a mathematical genius who struggled with paranoid schizophrenia, would rise, fall, and be resurrected with a Nobel Prize in the 1990s and his life would inspire an Academy Award-winning movie. That movie was based off of this biography written just a few years after Dr. Nash’s Nobel Prize announcement and, despite being over two decades old, offers an incredibly sympathetic portrait of the man and his life. If all you know about John Nash is his famous Nash Equilibrium or the movie, you don’t know the half of it.
John Nash Jr. was born to a middle class West Virginia family. Always eccentric, John Nash would soon show an affinity for mathematics, which would take him to Princeton and MIT. Dr. Nash’s contributions to mathematics includes his famous Nash Equilibrium, a key component of modern Game Theory that has had an enormous impact on economics and policy since the 1980s, as well as other theories. However, at the pinnacle of his career, Dr. Nash’s eccentricities would devolve into madness as paranoid schizophrenia would rob him of over two decades of his life. Miraculously, Dr. Nash would survive and be recognized for his contributions with the Nobel Prize in 1994. Step by step, Ms. Nasar takes us through Dr. Nash’s life. His ups and his downs, his eccentricities, his madness, are all well documented in these pages. Indeed, Ms. Nasar offers an incredibly sympathetic picture of her subject. Her descriptions of schizophrenia and how Dr. Nash’s particular case fits into the patterns of this particular mental illness, even how some might argue that Dr. Nash was bipolar rather than schizophrenic, are well documented. This biography does a great deal to dispel the myths surrounding this particular mental illness. But Ms. Nasar is never overly fawning over her subject. She notes how arrogant Dr. Nash could be around his peers and she describes how he could be incredibly cruel and unthinking towards the people closest to him. For those of you who only know about his marriage to Alicia Larde through the movie, know that their relationship was much more complicated than the movie makes it out to be.
Where this book is slightly deficient is in her descriptions of the mathematical theories Dr. Nash and his peers were researching. Indeed, while she is willing to go into detail about schizophrenia and its effects, she shies away from giving a satisfactory explanation of any of the mathematics Dr. Nash and others were working on. Not even the famous Nash Equilibrium, which won Dr. Nash the Nobel Prize, is explained well. There are a few exceptions to this, such as Dr. Nash’s work on differential geometry and nonlinear differential equations is explained a little better, but not much. Another issue with this book that is not the fault of Ms. Nasar is the books age. First published in 1998, this book is almost 23 years old. On top of that, Dr. Nash and Alicia lived another 17 years after publication, dying in a car crash together in 2015. Thus, as good as this biography is, it is ultimately incomplete. A new biography or at least an updated version of this book that would include a section on Dr. Nash’s later life and work would be most welcome.
Overall, this is an excellent biography. Ms. Nasar is sympathetic in her portrait of Dr. Nash, but she never overlooks his flaws. This does a great job of describing the ins and outs of Dr. Nash’s mental illness, but it does shy away from deeper explanations of the mathematical theories mentioned. And as complete a life as this book represents, the last 17 years of Dr. Nash’s life and work are missing. Whether you are a fan of the movie or just interested in great mathematical minds, this is a book worth picking up.
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