Focus on Words

A Beautiful Mind
by Sylvia Nasar
JOHN FORBES NASH, JR. a 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 tried 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 a 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 reality, 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 unexpected kind
that pushes scientific thinking in new directions.
Geniuses, the mathematician Paul Halmos wrote, “are of two kinds: the ones who
are just like all of us, but very much more so, and the ones who, apparently, have an
extra human spark. We can all run, and some of us can run the mile in less than 4
minutes; but there is nothing that most of us can do that compares with the creation of
the Great G-minor Fuguedd”.
Nash’s genius was of that mysterious variety more often associated with music
and art than with the oldest of all sciences. It wasn’t merely that his mind worked
faster, that his memory was more retentive, or that his power of concentration was
greater. The flashes of intuition were nonrational. Like other great mathematical
intuitionists Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, Jules Henri Poincare, Srinivasa Ramanujan,
Nash saw the vision first, constructing the laborious proofs long afterward. But even
after he would try to explain some astonishing result, the actual route he had taken
remained a mystery to others who tried to follow his reasoning.
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