A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash

The bestselling, prize-winning biography of a mathematical genius who suffered from schizophrenia, miraculously recovered, and then won a Nobel Prize.
1100631015
A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash

The bestselling, prize-winning biography of a mathematical genius who suffered from schizophrenia, miraculously recovered, and then won a Nobel Prize.
14.99 In Stock
A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash

A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash

by Sylvia Nasar
A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash

A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash

by Sylvia Nasar

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Overview


The bestselling, prize-winning biography of a mathematical genius who suffered from schizophrenia, miraculously recovered, and then won a Nobel Prize.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781439126493
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication date: 07/12/2011
Sold by: SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format: eBook
Pages: 464
Sales rank: 90,360
File size: 18 MB
Note: This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author


Sylvia Nasar is the author of the bestselling A Beautiful Mind, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. She is the John S. and James. L Knight Professor at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

Read an Excerpt

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.

Table of Contents


Contents

Prologue

Part One: A Beautiful Mind

1 Bluefield (1928-45)

2 Carnegie Institute of Technology (June 1945-June 1948)

3 The Center of the Universe (Princeton, Fall 1948)

4 School of Genius (Princeton, Fall 1948)

5 Genius (Princeton, 1948-49)

6 Games (Princeton, Spring 1949.)

7 John von Neumann (Princeton, 1948-49)

8 The Theory of Games

9 The Bargaining Problem (Princeton, Spring 1949)

10 Nash's Rival Idea (Princeton, 1949-50)

11 Lloyd (Princeton, 1950)

12 The War of Wits (RAND, Summer 1950)

13 Game Theory at RAND

14 The Draft (Princeton, 195O-51)

15 A Beautiful Theorem (Princeton, 1950-51)

16 MIT

17 Bad Boys

18 Experiments (RAND, Summer 1952)

19 Reds (Spring 1953)

20 Geometry

Part Two: Separate Lives

21 Singularity

22 A Special Friendship (Santa Monica, Summer 1952)

23 Eleanor

24 Jack

25 The Arrest (RAND, Summer 1954)

26 Alicia

27 The Courtship

28 Seattle (Summer 1956)

29 Death and Marriage (1956-57)

Part Three: A Slow Fire Burning

30 Olden Lane and Washington Square (1956-57)

31 The Bomb Factory

32 Secrets (Summer 1958)

33 Schemes (Fall 1958)

34 The Emperor of Antarctica

35 In the Eye of the Storm (Spring 1959)

36 Day-Breaks in Bowditch Hall (McLean Hospital, April-May, 1959)

37 Mad Hatter's Tea (May-June 1959)

Part Four: The Lost Years

38 Citoyen du Monde (Paris and Geneva, 1959-60)

39 Absolute Zero (Princeton, 1960)

40 Tower of Silence (Trenton State Hospital, 1961)

41 An Interlude of Enforced Rationality (July 1961-April 1963)

42 The "Blowing Up" Problem (Princeton and Carrier Clinic, 1963-65)

43 Solitude (Boston, 1965-67)

44 A Man All Alone in a Strange World (Roanoke, 1967-70)

45 Phantom of Fine Hall (Princeton, 1970s)

46 A Quiet Life (Princeton, 1970-90)

Part Five: The Most Worthy

47 Remission

48 The Prize

49 The Greatest Auction Ever (Washington, D.C., December 1994)

50 Reawakening (Princeton, 1995-97)

Notes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

What People are Saying About This

Timothy Ferris

Every once in a while there appears a book on science that mirrors the splendor of its subject. Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind is such a book -- an eloquent, heartbreaking, and heartwarming tale.

Oliver Sacks

A splendid book, deeply interesting and extraordinarily moving, remarkable for its sympathetic insights into both genius and schizophrenia.

David Herbert Donald

A brilliant book -- at once a powerful and moving biography of a great mathematical genius and an important contribution to American intellectual history.

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