A Beautiful Mind
The mathematician John Nash, the decades taken by schizophrenia, and the Nobel that came after. The book behind the film.
For the next three decades, Nash suffered from severe delusions, hallucinations, disordered thought and feeling, and a broken will.
Nasar reconstructs the life of John Forbes Nash from the mathematics that made his early reputation through the paranoid schizophrenia that overtook him at thirty and the slow, uneven remission that followed. The book sets his work in game theory and geometry beside the hospital admissions, the insulin shock treatment, the years of delusion at Princeton where colleagues watched him drift through the halls, and the eventual 1994 Nobel in economics.
What holds the account together is time. Nasar traces the illness across decades rather than as a single crisis, showing how it changes shape, recedes, and is managed by family, universities, and psychiatry across a shifting institutional landscape. She is careful about the recovery, treating it as gradual and partial rather than a clean cure, and she questions what remission means after so long a course.
The reporting draws on interviews with Nash, his wife Alicia, and the mathematicians around him. First published in 1998, it is franker about the illness than the 2001 film.
About the author
Sylvia Nasar
Sylvia Nasar, born in 1947, is an American journalist and author. Trained as an economist, she worked as a staff writer at Fortune and served as an economics correspondent for The New York Times from 1991 to 1999. She later became the Knight Professor of Business Journalism at Columbia University. She is best known for A Beautiful Mind, her 1998 biography of the mathematician John Nash, and for Grand Pursuit, a 2011 history of economic thought.
Details
- 1998
- Simon and Schuster
- Simon and Schuster
- 464
- 9781451628425