A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar

  In 1951, before Sputnik and Vietnam, MIT was not exactly an intellectual backwater, but it was nothing like what it is today. The Lincoln Laboratory was famous for its wartime research, but its future academic superstars were still relatively unknown youngsters, and powerhouse departments for which it has since become known — economics, linguistics, computer science, mathematics — were either infants or gleams in some academic’s eye. It was, in spirit and in fact, still very much the nation’s leading engineering school, not a great research university.5

  An environment more antithetical to the hothouse atmosphere of Princeton is hard to imagine. MIT’s large scale and modern contours made it feel like the behemoth state universities of the Midwest. The military, as well as industry, loomed awfully large, so large that MIT’s armed, plainclothes campus security force existed solely for the purpose of guarding the half-dozen “classified” sites scattered around the campus and preventing those without proper security clearances and identification from wandering in. ROTC and courses in military science were required of all MIT’s two-thousand-plus undergraduate men.6 The academic departments like mathematics and economics existed pretty much to cater to the engineering student — in Paul Samuelson’s words, “a pretty crude animal.”7 All counted as “service departments,” gas stations where engineers pulled up to get their tanks filled with obligatory doses of fairly elementary mathematics, physics, and chemistry.8 Economics, for example, had no graduate program at all until the war.9 Physics had no Nobel Laureates on its faculty at the time.10 Teaching loads were heavy — sixteen hours a week was not uncommon for senior faculty — and were weighted toward large introductory courses like calculus, statistics, and linear algebra.11 Its faculty were younger, less well known, and less credentialed than Harvard’s, Yale’s, or Princeton’s.

  “There were advantages,” said Samuelson. “A lot of the MIT faculty didn’t have Ph.D.’s. I came without a formal degree. S.olow came before he had a formal degree. We were treated magnificently. It was more of a meritocracy.” He added, “People would say, doesn’t everybody do that? Not up the river, we’d answer. How do you explain that? We’re Avis, we try harder.”12

  Socially, MIT was dominated by an old guard not of high-society intellectuals, but of middle-class Republicans and engineers. “It certainly was not a faculty club populated by cultivated Brahmins,” said Samuelson, who was then twenty-five years old: “When I came [in 1940] it was 85 percent engineering, 15 percent science.”13

  MIT also had a less exclusionary tradition than Harvard or even Princeton. By the 1950s, perhaps 40 percent of the mathematics faculty and students at MIT were Jewish.14 Bright youngsters from New York City public schools, effectively barred even then from attending Princeton as undergraduates, went there. Princeton was “out of the question for a Jew,” recalls Joseph Kohn, who enrolled as a freshman at MIT in 1950. “At Brooklyn Tech the greatest thing in the world was sending a student to MIT.”15

  Still smarting from his rejection by Princeton, Nash arrived at Building Two with something of a chip on his shoulder, a feeling that he was a swan among ducks. MIT was already changing, however. Indeed, bringing a brilliant young researcher like Nash on board in the mathematics department was itself a sign of that shift.

  There was money all of a sudden, not just for teaching the exploding numbers of students, but for research.16 The amounts were small by post-Sputnik standards or even those of today, but huge by prewar standards. Support for science, initially fueled by the successes during World War II, was now growing because of the Cold War. It came not just from the Army, Navy, and Air Force but from the Atomic Energy Commission and the Central Intelligence Agency. MIT wasn’t unique. Other institutions, from the big state universities in the upper Midwest to Stanford, grew up the same way. There was also the talent. Physics got many of the Los Alamos people. Electrical engineering was becoming a magnet for the first generation of computer scientists, an eclectic group of neurobiologists, applied mathematicians, and assorted visionaries like Jerome Lettvin and Walter Pitts, who saw the computer as a model for studying the architecture and functioning of the human brain.17 “It was very much a growing environment and science was a growing sphere,” said Samuelson, adding that after the war, the 85 percent-15 percent split between engineering and science had shifted to 50 percent-50 percent. He added: “It was the upswing in money … that made this possible. That was part of the whole postwar pattern.”18

  Mathematics was on the verge of becoming an important department, although that was not obvious to everyone at the time. The department had one famous name, Norbert Wiener (who wound up at MIT largely thanks to Harvard’s anti-Semitism), and two or three first-rate younger men, including the topologist George Whitehead and the analyst Norman Levinson. But otherwise, mathematics consisted largely of competent teachers rather than great researchers — “a few giants but a lot of mediocrities.”19

  The man who changed all that was appointed chairman of the department in 1947. William Ted Martin, called Ted by everyone who knew him, was the tall, skinny, loquacious son of an Arkansas country doctor. Blond and blue-eyed with a sunny disposition and a ready grin, Martin was married to the granddaughter of a president of Smith College and revved up with ambition. A man whose innate decency would turn him into one of Nash’s protectors after Nash became ill, Martin would soon endure his own trial by fire. At the height of the McCarthy witch hunt, Martin’s secret past as an underground member of the Communist Party in the late 1930s and early 1940s would be exposed, threatening both his career and his vision for the department.20 But in 1951 the past was still safely buried. A “sparkplug of a chairman,” his real talent was for making things happen, wheedling money out of the MIT administration, the Navy, and the Air Force, and using it to great, indeed astounding, effect.21

  One of Martin’s strokes of genius was figuring out that the cheapest and quickest way to upgrade the department was not to reel in a few more big names, but to lure young hotshots there for a year or two and handle them, as much as possible, with kid gloves. Copying Harvard’s Benjamin Pierce Fellows, Martin created C. L. E. Moore Instructorships, so called in honor of MIT’s most distinguished mathematician in the 1920s.22 Moore Instructors weren’t expected to join the permanent faculty. The idea was to get a stream of talent that would act as a catalyst, firing up MIT’s humdrum atmosphere and attracting better students, the best of whom now automatically went to the Ivies and Chicago.

  Since he wouldn’t have to live with them for long, or so he thought, Martin wasn’t scared of difficult personalities. “Bochner said Nash was worth appointing. ’Don’t worry about anything!’ ” Martin recalled.23 And Martin didn’t. He came to value Nash, not just as “a brilliant and creative young man,” but as an ally in his quest to make the department great. He would come to particularly rely on Nash’s absolute intellectual honesty: “When Nash mentioned somebody [as a potential hire], you didn’t wonder if he was a crony or a relative. If Nash said he was top flight, you didn’t need much in the way of outside references.”

  The most attractive figure at MIT from Nash’s point of view was Norbert Wiener. Wiener was, in some ways, an American John von Neumann, a polymath of great originality who made stunning contributions in pure mathematics up until the beginning of World War II and then embarked on a second and equally astounding career in applied mathematics.24 Like von Neumann, Wiener is known to the public for his later work. He was, among other things, the father of cybernetics, the application of mathematics and engineering to communications and control problems.

  Wiener was also famously eccentric. His appearance alone was remarkable. His beard, Samuelson recalled after Wiener’s death in 1964, was like “the Ancient Mariner’s.”25 He puffed on fat cigars. He waddled like a duck, a myopic parody of an absentminded professor. His extraordinary upbringing at the hands of his father, Leo, was the subject of two popular books, I Am a Genius and I Am a Mathematician, the first of which became a bestseller in the early
1950s. Prolific as he was, Wiener generated as many anecdotes about himself as theorems. He hardly seemed to know where he was. He would ask, for example, “When we met, was I walking to the faculty club or away from it? For in the latter case I’ve already had my lunch.”26 He was notoriously insecure. If he encountered someone he knew carrying a book under his arm, he would, as likely as not, ask anxiously whether his name was in the book.27 Friends and admirers traced this feature of his personality to his obsessive and overbearing father, who once bragged that he could turn a broomstick into a mathematician, and to Harvard’s anti-Semitism, which cost Wiener an appointment in Birkhoff’s department. As Samuelson said in a eulogy after Wiener’s death: “The exodus from Harvard dealt a lasting psychic trauma to Norbert Wiener. It did not help that his father was a Harvard professor … or that Norbert’s mother regarded his move as a cruel comedown in life.”28

  Wiener’s colleagues at MIT knew that he suffered from periods of manic excitability followed by severe depressions, constantly threatened to resign, and sometimes spoke of suicide. “When he was high he’d run all over MIT telling people his latest theorem,” Zipporah “Fagi” Levinson, the wife of Norman Levin-son, recalled. “You couldn’t stop him.”29 At times, he would come to the Levinsons’ house, weeping, and say that he wished to kill himself.30 One of Wiener’s ever-present fears was that he would go mad; his brother Theo, as well as two nephews, suffered from schizophrenia.31

  Perhaps because of his own psychological struggles, Wiener had an acute empathy for other people’s trials. “He was egotistical and childish, but also very sensitive to the real needs of others,” Mrs. Levinson recalled.32 When a younger colleague was writing a book but couldn’t afford a typewriter, Wiener showed up at his door unannounced with a Royal portable under his arm.

  When Nash arrived at MIT in 1951, Wiener embraced him enthusiastically and encouraged Nash’s growing interest in the subject of fluid dynamics — an interest that eventually led Nash to his most important work. For example, Nash sent Wiener a note in November 1952, inviting him to a seminar Nash was to give on “turbulence via statistical mechanics, collision functions, etc.”33 His postscript, saying, “I’ve found the smoothing effect in definite form now,” suggests that Nash talked about his research with Wiener, something he did with almost no one else in the department. Nash saw Wiener, a genius who was at once adulated and isolated, as a kindred spirit and fellow exile.34 He copied some of Wiener’s more extreme mannerisms, his own form of homage to the older man.35

  • • •

  But Nash was to become far closer to Norman Levinson, a first-rate mathematician and a man of extraordinary character, who would play a role in Nash’s career similar to those of Steenrod and Tucker at Princeton — a combination of sounding board and father substitute. Levinson, then in his early forties, was more enigmatic than Martin but far more accessible than Wiener.36 Wiry, of medium height, with craggy features, Levinson was a fine teacher who rarely displayed the slightest facial expression and never referred to his own accomplishments. He suffered from hypochondria and from wide mood swings, long manic periods of intense creative activity followed by months, sometimes years, of depression in which nothing interested him. A former Communist like Martin, Levinson would suffer doubly during the McCarthy years when he endured not only notoriety and threats to his career as a mathematician, but his teenage daughter’s slide into mental illness.37 Despite these burdens, Levinson was, and would long remain, by far the most respected member of the department. Thoughtful, decisive, and attuned to the personal as well as intellectual needs of those around him, Levinson was father confessor and wise elder, the one whose judgments were constantly sought and carried most weight, on everything from research to appointments.

  His personal history was one of individual triumph over bleak beginnings. Born in Lynn, Massachusetts, just before World War I, Levinson was the son of a shoe factory worker who earned eight dollars a week and whose education consisted of attending a yeshiva for a few years. His mother was illiterate. Despite a childhood of desperate poverty and an education that consisted of attending rundown vocational schools, Levinson’s brilliance was undeniable. He managed, with the help of Wiener, who spotted his talent, to attend MIT and, later, Cambridge. At Cambridge, he became a protégé of G. H. Hardy and embarked on a series of brilliant papers on ordinary differential equations. “He was very uncouth, very provincial,” his wife, Zipporah, who met Levinson soon after he returned from England, recalled in 1995. “He was highly opinionated and too ignorant to know that he didn’t know everything. But he’d plunge in and make a good paper, despite the fact that he didn’t know the literature. Wiener ignored his rough edges.”

  Like many promising young Jewish mathematicians of his generation, Levinson had difficulty getting an academic post when he returned to the States, and it was Hardy who, while visiting Harvard in 1937, was ultimately responsible for Levinson’s appointment that year at MIT. The university’s provost, Vannevar Bush, had turned down Wiener’s recommendation that Levinson be offered an assistant professorship when Hardy, who at that time was both an outspoken opponent of Nazi anti-Semitism and the most prominent member of the German mathematical society, went with Wiener to the provost’s office to protest. “Tell me, Mr. Bush, do you think you’re running an engineering school or a theological seminary?” he is supposed to have said. When the provost gave a puzzled frown, Hardy went on: “If it isn’t, why not hire Levinson?”

  Nash was attracted by Levinson’s strong personality and by a quality that he both shared and admired, namely Levinson’s uncommon willingness to tackle new and difficult problems. Levinson was an early pioneer in the theory of partial differential equations, recognized by a Bôcher Prize, and the author of an important theorem in the quantum theory of scattering of particles. Most remarkably, when he was in his early sixties and already suffering from the brain tumor that would eventually kill him, Levinson achieved the most important result of his career, the solution to a part of the famous Riemann Hypothesis.38 In many ways, Levinson was a role model for Nash.

  17

  Bad Boys

  People considered him a bad boy — but a great one.

  — DONALD J. NEWMAN, 1995

  The Great Man … is colder, harder, less hesitating, and without fear of “opinion”; he lacks the virtues that accompany respect and “respectability,” and altogether everything that is the “virtue of the herd.” If he cannot lead, he goes alone… . He knows he is incommunicable: he finds it tasteless to be familiar… . When not speaking to himself, he wears a mask. There is a solitude within him that is inaccessible to praise or blame.

  — FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, The Will to Power

  NASH WAS just twenty-three years old when he became an MIT instructor. He was not only the youngest member of the faculty, but younger than many of the graduate students: His boyish looks and adolescent behavior won him nicknames like Li’l Abner and the Kid Professor.1

  By MIT standards of that time, the teaching duties of C. L. E. Moore instructors were light. But Nash found them irksome nonetheless — as he did everything that interfered with his research or smacked of routine. Later, he would be one of the few active researchers on the faculty who avoided giving courses in his own research area. Partly, it was a matter of temperament, partly a matter of calculation. He shrewdly realized that his advancement did not depend on how well or poorly he performed in front of students. He’d advise other instructors, “If you’re at MIT, forget about teaching. Just do research.”2

  Perhaps for this reason, Nash was mostly assigned required courses for undergraduates. In the seven years of his teaching career at MIT, he seems to have taught only three graduate courses, all introductory, one in logic in his second year, one in probability, and a third, in the fall of 1958, in game theory.3 Mostly, it seems, he taught different sections of undergraduate calculus.

  His lectures were closer to free association than exposition. Once, he described how he planne
d to teach complex numbers to freshmen: “Let’s see … I’d tell them i equals square root of minus one. But I’d also tell them that it could be minus the square root of minus one. Then so how would you decide which one… .” He started to wander. Just what freshmen needed, the listener said, in disgusted tones, in 1995. “He didn’t care whether the students learned or not, made outrageous demands, and talked about subjects that were either irrelevant or far too advanced.”4 He was a tough grader too.

  At times his ideas about the classroom had more to do with playing mind games than pedagogy. Robert Aumann, who later became a distinguished game theoretician and was then a freshman at MIT, described Nash’s escapades in the classroom as “flamboyant” and “mischievous.”5 Joseph Kohn, later the chairman of the Princeton mathematics department, called him “a bit of a gamester.”6 During the 1952 Stevenson-Eisenhower race, Nash was convinced, quite rightly as it turned out, that Eisenhower would win. Most of the students supported Stevenson. He made elaborate bets with the students that were constructed so that he would win regardless of who won the election. The very brightest students were amused, but most were frightened away and soon the better-informed students started to avoid his courses altogether.

  In his first year at MIT, Nash taught an analysis course for advanced undergraduates. The course was supposed to be an introductory look at calculus in which students weren’t just learning manipulations but rather absolutely solid proofs of statements and how to construct such proofs. Between the first and second semesters of the yearlong course, the number of students dwindled from about thirty to five.

  Kohn recalled: “He gave a one-hour test. He handed out blue books where you filled in your name and the course number on the cover. When the bell rang, you were supposed to turn over the exam sheet and start working on the test. There were four problems. Problem number one was What is your name?’ The other three problems were fairly hard. Since I knew by then how his mind worked, I made sure to write next to number one, ‘My name is Joseph Kohn.’ People who assumed that writing their name on the cover was enough got twenty-five points taken off.”7