John Nash

The Drive Home from Oslo

On May 19, 2015, in a ceremony in Oslo, the King of Norway handed an 86-year-old American mathematician the Abel Prize — mathematics’ closest equivalent to a Nobel — for work he had done more than half a century earlier on nonlinear partial differential equations. The laureate, John Forbes Nash Jr., was already a Nobel Memorial Prize winner, honored in 1994 for a 27-page doctoral thesis he had written at twenty-one. No one else has ever held both prizes. No one else has come close to the shape of the life behind them.

Four days later, Nash and his wife Alicia landed at Newark airport and climbed into a taxi for the last leg home to Princeton Junction. On the New Jersey Turnpike, the driver lost control while passing another car and hit a guardrail. John, 86, and Alicia, 82, were killed together, an hour from home, with the prize money still in the bank and the medal in their luggage.

The obituaries all reached for the same phrase — a beautiful mind — the title of the biography and Oscar-winning film that had made Nash the world’s most famous example of genius entangled with madness. But the film had sanded the story smooth. The real life was harder and stranger: a decade of mathematics so brilliant it changed three separate fields; thirty years lost to paranoid schizophrenia, spent as a muttering ghost haunting the Princeton campus; a wife who divorced him and then sheltered him anyway for decades; and a slow, unglamorous return that no one — least of all psychiatry — quite knows how to explain. Nash’s own explanation was the most startling: that at some point, like a man on an intellectual diet, he had simply begun refusing to believe his delusions.

“This Man Is a Genius”

John Nash was born on June 13, 1928, in Bluefield, West Virginia, a coal-country town of engineers and businessmen. His father was an electrical engineer, his mother a former schoolteacher who pushed her awkward, bookish son ahead in school. Young John was a loner who preferred experiments to playmates — he was doing serious chemistry in his bedroom by his early teens — and a reader who found his direction in E. T. Bell’s Men of Mathematics, a romantic collection of mathematicians’ lives.

He entered the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh at seventeen intending to become a chemical engineer like his father. He lasted a semester, drifted to chemistry, and then gave in to the obvious: mathematics. By 1948, at nineteen, he left Carnegie with both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree and offers from Harvard and Princeton. Princeton wanted him more, and his professor R. J. Duffin supplied what may be the most efficient recommendation letter in academic history. It said, in its entirety: “This man is a genius.”

Princeton’s mathematics department in 1948 was the center of the intellectual world — Einstein and Gödel were up the road at the Institute for Advanced Study, and John von Neumann, the most dazzling mind of the age, had just co-written the book that invented game theory. Nash arrived arrogant, strange, and spectacularly ambitious. He skipped classes on principle, worked on problems chosen because other people thought them impossible, and invented, independently, the elegant board game later sold as Hex; at Princeton they just called it “Nash.”

Then, in his second year, he did the thing his name now stands for. Von Neumann’s game theory handled two-player, winner-take-all games, and treated everything else through coalitions and bargaining. Nash asked the more general question: in any game, with any number of self-interested players who can’t make binding deals, is there a resting point — a set of strategies where no player can do better by changing course alone? In his doctoral thesis, all of 27 pages, he proved that such a point always exists. When he sketched the idea to von Neumann, the great man cut him off: “That’s trivial, you know. That’s just a fixed point theorem.” The judgment was technically true and historically absurd. The “trivial” idea — the Nash equilibrium — became the workhorse of modern economics, the tool used to analyze everything from nuclear standoffs and price wars to auctions, traffic, and evolution.

The Best Decade Anyone Ever Had

Nash finished his PhD in 1950, at twenty-two, and spent the decade proving he was more than a one-theorem man. Summers he consulted at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, where game theory was being weaponized for Cold War strategy. The arrangement ended abruptly in 1954, when he was arrested in a police sting operation in a men’s restroom — one of the era’s routine entrapment campaigns against gay men. The charge was dropped, but RAND stripped his security clearance and let him go. Biographers have documented Nash’s intense attachments to men in these years, which he later denied; what the episode establishes beyond dispute is the machinery of the time, which could end a career on an arrest without a conviction.

The mathematics, meanwhile, got deeper. At MIT, where he joined the faculty at twenty-three, Nash attacked a problem geometers considered hopeless: whether the abstract curved spaces of Riemannian geometry could always be realized, distances intact, inside ordinary Euclidean space. His two embedding theorems (1954, 1956) said yes, by methods so unexpected that mathematicians still describe them with awe; the Abel committee would cite this work sixty years later. Then he solved a major open problem about the smoothness of solutions to the equations governing heat and diffusion — only to learn that an unknown Italian, Ennio De Giorgi, had gotten there months earlier by another route. The near-miss, by most accounts, wounded him badly; the Fields Medal he coveted in 1958 went elsewhere.

His personal life in these years left casualties the famous movie never mentions. In 1953 a Boston nurse named Eleanor Stier bore his son, John David Stier; Nash refused to marry her and was, for decades, a cold and absent father. In 1957 he married Alicia Lardé, a brilliant El Salvador–born physics student at MIT — one of only sixteen women in her class. He was tenured at MIT before thirty, and Fortune magazine had just named him one of the brightest young stars of American mathematics.

He was thirty when the voices started.

The Phantom of Fine Hall

In the winter of 1958–59, with Alicia newly pregnant, Nash’s colleagues noticed his conversation sliding somewhere alarming. He told them extraterrestrials were sending him encrypted messages through the front page of the New York Times. He declined a University of Chicago offer, explaining — reportedly — that he was scheduled to become Emperor of Antarctica. A lecture at Columbia dissolved into fragments no one could follow. In the spring of 1959, Alicia had him committed to McLean Hospital outside Boston, where the diagnosis was paranoid schizophrenia. He resigned his MIT professorship. Their son, John Charles, was born that May while his father was writing letters about world government; the boy would grow up to be a mathematician — and to develop schizophrenia himself.

What followed was three decades of loss, in a pattern familiar to any family that has lived with the disease: hospitalizations (including insulin coma therapy at Trenton State Hospital), partial recoveries, relapses, flights to Europe where he tried to renounce his U.S. citizenship, delusions of persecution and messianic identity. Asked once why he, a mathematician devoted to reason, could believe aliens were recruiting him, Nash gave the answer that may be the most honest sentence ever spoken about psychosis: because the ideas “came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.”

Alicia divorced him in 1963. Then she did something harder than staying married: from 1970 she took him into her house in Princeton Junction anyway — as, in her word, a “boarder” — because the alternative was the streets or the asylums. After 1970 Nash refused all medication. He spent his days wandering the Princeton campus, a silent figure in mismatched clothes who left cryptic equations and numerological messages on the blackboards of Fine Hall at night. Students called him the Phantom of Fine Hall, mostly not knowing who he was. The mathematics department, to its lasting credit, quietly let him be — a campus that functioned, as one colleague put it, as the asylum that never locked its doors.

And then, gradually, invisibly, through the 1980s, the Phantom got better. Late remission happens in schizophrenia more often than the public believes, though no one fully understands it. Nash’s own account was characteristically exact: he began, he said, to treat his delusional thoughts the way a dieter treats food — recognizing the hallucinated politics and cosmic messages as they arrived and choosing, effortfully, not to feed them. He started talking to mathematicians about mathematics again. The blackboard messages became actual problems.

Stockholm, Oslo, and the Turnpike

By the early 1990s, economics had been transformed by game theory, and the discipline’s foundational concept bore the name of a man most economists assumed was dead. When the Nobel committee moved to honor game theory in 1994, the prospect of giving the prize to a diagnosed schizophrenic set off a fight inside the Swedish Academy — Sylvia Nasar later documented how close Nash came to being passed over as too great a risk for the prize’s dignity. He wasn’t. On October 11, 1994, Nash shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with John Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten. At the ceremonies he was lucid, dry, and funny; he remarked that after decades of irrationality he had returned to reason, but that the return was not entirely a cause for joy — rationality, he noted, was also a limit on a man’s relation to the cosmos.

The last two decades gave him back an ordinary life, which for a man with his history was the extraordinary prize. Princeton gave him an office and a modest research post; he worked on cooperation in game theory and on ideas about ideal money; he rode the bus, attended seminars, answered students’ emails. Nasar’s 1998 biography made his story famous, and the 2001 film — with its invented visual hallucinations, its intact marriage, its missing first son — made a version of it immortal. Nash regarded the movie with amused detachment; it wasn’t his life, but it had made his illness something people could talk about. In 2001, thirty-eight years after their divorce, John and Alicia remarried. Much of their late energy went to the cause they knew from inside: care for people with mental illness, including their son.

The Abel Prize, in the spring of 2015, honored the deepest of his work — the embedding theorems and the PDE analysis that mathematicians had always rated above the famous thesis. Days after the Oslo ceremony came the turnpike, and the double obituary, and the strange completeness of it: the couple who had survived the worst thing that can happen to a mind died together, in a single instant, at the peak of the story’s repair.

What remains is threefold. In science: an idea so useful it disappeared into the furniture of the modern world — every spectrum auction, every analysis of oligopoly or arms race or evolutionary strategy stands on the equilibrium a 21-year-old defined in 27 pages, and geometry and analysis still stand on what he did before thirty. In medicine and memory: living proof that schizophrenia is not always a life sentence, and a permanent argument for the unglamorous preconditions of recovery — shelter, patience, and a community willing to let a broken colleague haunt its blackboards until he found his way back. And at the center, less celebrated than either: Alicia Nash, who understood before the theorists did that some games are only won by the player who refuses to defect.

Sources

1. Nash, John F. — Autobiographical essay, The Nobel Prizes 1994 (NobelPrize.org: nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1994/nash/biographical/)
2. Nasar, Sylvia — A Beautiful Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1998)
3. MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive — “John F Nash (1928–2015)” (mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Nash/)
4. The Abel Prize / Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters — 2015 citation for Nash and Nirenberg (abelprize.no)
5. Kuhn, Harold W. & Nasar, Sylvia (eds.) — The Essential John Nash (Princeton University Press, 2002)
6. Princeton University — statement on the deaths of John and Alicia Nash, May 24, 2015; CNN and Planet Princeton crash reporting, May 24, 2015
7. PBS American Experience — “John Nash (1928–2015)” / A Brilliant Madness (2002)