The Story of John Nash

Professor R.J. Duffin wrote only one line in his recommendation letter when a young boy named John Nash applied at Princeton for graduation in 1948, “This man is a genius”. Born in 1948, this man is a real genius and one of the best mathematicians in the planet. His famous ‘Nash Equilibrium’ is a cornerstone in the field of economics. He won Novel Prize for his work in 1994. His work on cooperative games and governing dynamics are also equally famous. While he was still an undergraduate at the Princeton, he had managed to prove Brouwer’s fixed point theorem. Later, he solved one of the Riemann’s most perplexing mathematical solutions.(Read More)

After completing his graduation from Princeton, he got tenured at the MIT in 1958. While at his threshold of his career, he got struck by paranoid schizophrenia. Psychiatrists define the term ‘schizophrenia’ as a severe psychiatric disorder with symptoms of emotional instability, detachment from reality and withdrawal into the self. He spent next two decades of his life, virtually incapicated by this disease. The genius and the mastermind had to live the most energetic and efficient years of his life in isolation in the hospitals. With great patience and love from his wife, later he was able to cope with the disease independently which itself is a miracle in the medical history. Later he returned to the Princeton again and it was lot later, at his mid sixties that he was allowed to teach at the Princeton again.

Not many people knew about this great mind until Russell Crowe’s ‘A Beautiful Mind’, a movie adapted from John Nash’s life came to us. There are claims that the story is nowhere near to the actual suffering of John Nash. There are many other controversial issues about John Nash. Nascar in his biography of Nash writes that Nash had recurring liaisons with other men. As an undergraduate, he once climbed into a friend's bed while the friend was sleeping and "made a pass at him. In 1954, Nash was arrested for indecent exposure in a bathroom in Santa Monica, which cost him his position at RAND.

John Nash and Alicia Larde married in February 1957. Their son, John Charles Martin Nash, born May 20, 1959, remained nameless for a year. On the day after Christmas in 1962, Alicia filed for divorce. Her papers stated that Nash blamed her for twice committing him to a mental institution. He had moved into another room and refused to have sex with her for more than two years. But Nash moved in with Alicia again in 1970. Nascar claims that Nash’s married life was lots of conflicts.

Wherever you go, if there is one thing that you will not get rid of, then it surely is the controversy. At that pint what really does matter is what you chose to believe and what you not. Now there lies one question do you want to recognize John Nash as the mathematician who could solve the problem of which life, which the medical science itself had denied to have cure of? Or the person with lots of bla-bla-blas in his life?