John Nash

In May 2015, the King of Norway handed 86-year-old John Nash the Abel Prize — mathematics’ closest equivalent to a Nobel — making him the only person ever to hold both it and the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics. Four days later, riding home from the airport, he and his wife Alicia were killed when their taxi hit a guardrail on the New Jersey Turnpike, an hour from home. The obituaries reached for a beautiful mind, but the film had sanded the story smooth. The real life was harder and stranger.

Nash arrived at Princeton in 1948 at nineteen, carried by a recommendation letter that read, in its entirety, “This man is a genius.” In his second year he proved, in a 27-page doctoral thesis, that every game among self-interested players has a resting point where no one can do better by changing course alone. Von Neumann dismissed the idea as “trivial”; the Nash equilibrium became the workhorse of modern economics, underlying the analysis of everything from nuclear standoffs to auctions. Through his twenties Nash kept getting deeper — his embedding theorems and work on partial differential equations are what the Abel committee honored sixty years later.

He was thirty when the voices started. In 1959 he was committed with paranoid schizophrenia, resigned his MIT professorship, and began three decades of hospitalizations, relapses, and delusion — he believed aliens were sending him messages, he said, because the ideas “came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did.” Alicia divorced him in 1963, then did something harder: from 1970 she sheltered him in her Princeton house anyway, while he wandered the campus as the “Phantom of Fine Hall,” leaving cryptic equations on blackboards at night. Through the 1980s, gradually and without medication, he got better — by his own account, learning to refuse his delusions the way a dieter refuses food.

The 1994 Nobel, the 1998 biography and 2001 film, and his 2001 remarriage to Alicia gave him back an ordinary life — the extraordinary prize, for a man with his history. What remains is an idea so useful it disappeared into the furniture of the modern world, living proof that schizophrenia is not always a life sentence, and at the center of it Alicia Nash, who understood before the theorists did that some games are only won by the player who refuses to defect.