A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar

  As Nash says, “I did not want to publish a collected works simply because I wanted to think of myself as, and assume the posture of, a mathematician, still actively engaged in research and not just resting on his laurels (as they say). And of course I knew that if a collected works was not published at this time, then it could be published later when, hopefully, I would have nice new things to add to it.”12 In these feelings, however, he is not so different from his brilliant contemporaries. They, too, are having to face, or have already faced, the prospect that they are likely never to match their past achievements. Some have remained more active than others. But aging is a fact of life, and an especially stringent one for a mathematician. It is, for most of them, a young man’s game.

  It takes extraordinary courage to return to research after a hiatus of nearly thirty years. But this is exactly what Nash did. As he told the Madrid audience, “I am again engaged in scientific study. I am avoiding routine problems and instead I am dabbling.’ ”

  Nash had been thinking about a mathematical theory of the universe since before his meeting with Einstein. Since the lecture in Uppsala, he has suffered various setbacks. In August 1995, he said, “I got results that indicated I had made a fundamental error a long time ago and that I must reformulate … [the] theory.” Apparently “there was stuff being lost in a singular integration and when I considered distributed matter instead of a point particle, I found the lost stuff which had been erroneously ignored” — adding, with characteristic objectivity, that “this is good since I have avoided publishing a version based on errors.”

  He went on to describe the specific error:

  There was a discrepancy in the field … which spoiled things. Recalculation revealed … there had been errors in the calculation. Now I must finish up the calculation for a distributed mass of gravitating matter, at least to the first order level of approximation. This level itself could bring an interesting (distinctive result).13

  • • •

  This evaluation of the difficulties encountered in his research gives a good idea that the problems Nash is working on are ambitious, that he has lost none of his taste for making high-risk bets (whether on ideas or stocks!), and that his thinking is still sharp. And even if his chances of achieving a new breakthrough are statistically small, as he says, the pleasures of thinking about problems are once again his.

  The truth, however, is that the research has not been the main thing in his present life. The important theme has been reconnecting to family, friends, and community. This has become the urgent undertaking. The old fear that he depended on others and that they depended on him has faded. The wish to reconcile, to care for those who need him, is uppermost. He and his sister Martha, estranged for nearly twenty-five years, now talk on the telephone once a week. Johnny, of course, is the main thing, the constant.

  It was Nash who had told the women to call the police.14 Johnny had been living at home. He had been all right for a while, but then he began to wear a paper crown. One afternoon, he wanted some money. Because he believed he was a sovereign, he thought that he should be able to get money from Sovereign Bank. But the ATM in front of the bank would not spit out any cash. In fact, it would not return his bank card. Agitated and unhappy, Johnny called his mother, who has an account at Sovereign, and demanded she meet him at the ATM and get his card out of the machine. Alicia told John, who insisted on going with her. The couple tried, vainly, to extract Johnny’s card. They also tried, unsuccessfully, to soothe Johnny. At that point, their son became enraged, picked up a big stick, and started to poke first his mother, then his father. Some bystanders across the street stopped when they saw the young man threatening the two elderly people. Nash shouted for one of them to call the police. A squad car pulled up. The police took Johnny, whom they knew well, back to Trenton State.

  Johnny was in the hospital when his parents got the news from Stockholm informing them of Nash’s Nobel. Nash and Alicia called him first. He thought that they were pulling his leg, that it was a joke, and hung up on them. Later he saw his father’s face on CNN.15

  The subject of Johnny’s future is extremely painful. Nash had spoken matter-offactly about it. Alicia, looking miserable, said nothing and instead sank deep into her seat and closed her eyes. She finally interjected, “He just wants to get on with his life.”16

  The hopeful path that Johnny seemed to be on in his early twenties had long ago petered out. Whether because of the stress of teaching, the social isolation, or because the remission had simply run its course, the year at Marshall University was a disaster. He had come home and has not worked since. “Of course I’ve been a bad example,” Nash admits.17

  Johnny wanted to get a job, Nash said, but he seemed to think he would be able to get one in a college mathematics department. He had been writing letters introducing himself as the son of a Nobel Laureate and asking for a position. Now Nash was telling the Kuhns that Johnny would not take his medicine when he was not in the hospital. Alicia adds, “He goes to the hospital, he gets better, but when he gets home he doesn’t like to take his medication.” Then he would get sick again, hearing voices and having delusions. He would be hospitalized again and get better. Then it would start all over again. Watching over Johnny is now Nash’s main task in life. Except when Johnny is “on the road” wandering around the country on Greyhound buses, Nash is his caretaker. Nash takes it for granted that his son is his responsibility. As Nash said on one occasion, “My time of delusional thinking is, presumably, in the past, but my son’s time of it is right now.”18 They get up in the morning together after Alicia has gone to work. They eat breakfast together. Nash takes him to the library, to the institute, to Fine Hall. On Monday evenings they all attend family therapy together. Nash has tried to get his son interested in the computer and plays computer chess with him. He has said: “Ultimately computers could be a good sort of occupational therapy (as perhaps I was benefited in an OT [occupational therapy] fashion by [Hale] Trotter’s help in letting me get familiar with computer use.)19

  Johnny is thirty-eight years old. He is tall and handsome like his father, and he and his father share an interest in mathematics and chess. But Johnny’s illness has dragged on for more than half his life, a quarter of a century. He has been treated with the newest generation of drugs, including Clozaril, Risperadol, and, most recently, Zyprexa. These drugs, which have enabled him, for the most part, to stay out of the hospital, have not given him a life. Time hardly passes for him. He no longer competes in chess tournaments — once his greatest joy. He no longer reads, saying that he has not been able to for a long time. He is often angry and occasionally violent.20

  Life with Johnny is a tremendous strain on Nash and Alicia. Nash calls it being “perturbed,” “tyrannized,” and he is often preoccupied with the “drift and danger of degradation.”21 It is a constant disruption even when, as is often the case, Johnny is roaming around the country on Greyhound buses. For instance, Alicia and John go to the Olive Garden to celebrate Nash’s birthday, and Johnny calls to say that he has lost his ATM card and has no money. The evening is spent wiring him funds. “We’re at our wits’ end,” Alicia said recently. “You work so hard … and then he’s out of it. The Nobel hasn’t helped Johnny at all.”22

  Johnny draws Nash and Alicia together and tears them apart. There are deep conflicts. They blame each other for Johnny’s misbehavior — when he destroys things in the house, attacks them, acts inappropriately in public. Nash feels that Alicia expects him to be the bad cop, a role he’s not happy with, while she is the soft one. But they rely on each other. They agree every day on what one or the other should do. They also agree when it is time to hospitalize him. Nash is more judgmental and apt to hold Johnny responsible for his illness. He’s sometimes quite cruel, telling Harold Kuhn and others at times that people like Johnny ought to be jailed or that he has chosen to be as he is: “I don’t think of my son … as entirely a sufferer. In part, he is simply choosing to escape from ‘the world.
’ ”23

  Despite such moments of insensitivity, the truth is that Nash expresses hope and pleasure when there is the prospect of a new medication, a new therapy, or when he gets an idea — like teaching Johnny how to play chess on the computer — that he thinks will help him. When his friend Avinash Dixit invites him for dinner, he immediately asks if he might bring Johnny along.24

  At Dixifs, Johnny takes out a chess set, and father and son sit down to play. Nash is “less than mediocre.” At one point, he says he wants to take back a bad move. Johnny lets him. Then Nash wants to take back another.

  “Dad, if you keep doing that, you’ll win,” says Johnny.

  “But when I play against the computer, I’m allowed to take back moves,” Nash says.

  “But, Dad,” protests Johnny, “I’m not a computer! I’m a human being!”

  When it is time to go to the pharmacy for Johnny’s “meds,” Nash accompanies Alicia.25 When it is time to attend an open house at the outpatient program where Johnny is sometimes enrolled, Nash is there and on time.26 Alicia sees this and feels supported by him. She feels that she couldn’t do without him.

  Marriage is easily the most mysterious of human relationships. Attachments that seem superficial can become surprisingly deep and lasting. Such is the bond between Nash and Alicia. In retrospect, one feels that this is not an accidental pairing, that these two people needed each other. Strong-minded, pragmatic, and independent as she is, Alicia’s girlish infatuation has survived the disillusionments, hardships, and disappointments. She takes Nash clothes shopping. She frets, when he travels, that he’ll be kidnaped by terrorists or killed in a plane crash or merely worn out. When his ankle swells from a sprain, she leaves a dinner party and sits with him for four hours in the emergency room. More telling, she looks at an old photograph of him in bathing trunks at a poolside in California and says with a giggle, “Aren’t his legs beautiful?”27

  He, meanwhile, sets his clock by her. Stubborn, reserved, self-centered, and jealous of his time (and money) as he is, Nash does nothing without consulting Alicia first, defers to her wishes, and tries to help her, whether it is by washing the dishes, straightening out a problem at the bank, or going with her to family therapy every Monday night. She is the one to whom he faithfully reports the day’s events, whom he ran into, what the lecture was about, what he ate for lunch. They argue about money, the housework, Johnny, social engagements, but he has committed himself to making her life easier and more joyful.

  Nash is trying to be more sensitive and accommodating. He said, self-criticallv, “I know I have my social faults and I make Alicia very angry when she is saying something that I can anticipate before she’s finished and then I start saying something as if what she’s saying is not of an importance.”28 He accepts, with some humor, that his genius does not make him the authority on all matters. When it comes to refinancing their mortgage or choosing between gas and oil heat, he complains humorously that Alicia does not take him seriously as an “economics sage … notwithstanding the Nobel.”29

  He does, of course, often wound her. But he catches himself, too, and makes amends. A typical exchange: at Gaby and Armand Borel’s dinner party,30 Alicia announces to the assembled company that their son has received a tentative offer to teach mathematics at a small college in Mexico. Nash engages in an act of cruelty. “Yes,” he says, “my son is in a mental hospital in Arkansas but he got a job offer!” He is laughing at the absurdity of this juxtaposition. This is too much for Alicia. “You have to be fair to Johnny,” she returns. Nash says nothing. But later in the evening he goes to some lengths to make amends. He brings an offering, maps of Mexico, that he found in books on the Borels’ shelves, to Alicia. He takes the opportunity — during a conversation about Andrew Wiles’s successful proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem — to point out that Johnny had done some “classical” number theory in graduate school. Johnny had published “one correct result, one incorrect, but the correct one was a breakthrough of sorts,” he tells the other guests. Alicia responds by paying attention, by taking in what he means.

  Much of the renewal of their marriage has taken place since the Nobel. There is now a sense of reciprocity. It is as if regaining the respect of his peers has made Nash feel that he has more to offer the people in his life, and has made those close to him, especially Alicia, feel that he has more to give. This has become self-reinforcing. At one time, before the Nobel, Alicia referred to Nash as her “boarder” and they lived essentially like two distantly related individuals under the same roof. Now there is even some discussion of remarrying, although in what was perhaps an assertion of Nash’s old insistence on “rationality,” they gave the idea up as impractical, as so many older couples have in light of the attendant tax and Social Security penalties. However, a certificate is not of real importance. They are a real couple again.

  John Stier took the first step in ending his twenty-year estrangement from his father, mailing him a copy of the June 1993 Boston Globe column that speculated on Nash’s chances of winning a Nobel.31 He sent the clipping anonymously, but Nash immediately guessed its source. He was unsure whether to interpret John Stier’s gesture as a taunt or a friendly overture. He told Harold Kuhn that something in the way the letter was addressed to him hinted at mockery. But the following February, two months after his triumph in Stockholm, Nash boarded a shuttle bound for Boston to spend a weekend getting reacquainted with his older son.

  Such an encounter, inspired by hopes of putting their sad history behind them, was bound to be bittersweet, an occasion that revived as many painful memories, disappointments, and misunderstandings as it unlocked happier feelings.32When the two men finally met face to face, John Stier was no longer the nineteen-year-old Amherst College history major Nash remembered from their last encounter, but a man of forty-four — nearly as old as Nash had been in 1972, when they had last seen each other. Physically, he resembled his father to a striking degree. The impressive stature, broad shoulders, luminous eyes, English complexion, and finely modeled nose were all Nash’s. But in his life’s choices — and in his ability to derive great satisfaction from helping others — he was his mother’s son. John Stier had stayed in Boston, remaining single and pursuing a career as a registered nurse. At the time, he was thinking of returning to graduate school to obtain an advanced degree in nursing.

  In the two days they spent in each other’s company — the most time they had ever been together at one stretch — they touched on personal topics only occasionally. Indeed, they were mostly with other people; it was important for Nash to have others confirm the reconciliation. They sat looking at old photographs with Eleanor, had a meal with Arthur Mattuck, the closest friend of Nash’s “first family,” and visited Marvin Minsky in his artificial intelligence laboratory at MIT. At one point, Nash telephoned Martha from John Stier’s apartment and put his son on the phone.33

  When father and son did venture into personal territory, Nash was, as usual, full of the best intentions. He wished to show his son how vitally important he was to him, he wanted to share with him some of his own recent good fortune, he wanted to give him the benefit of paternal advice. He was motivated by love and by a sense of responsibility. He told John that he would divide his estate equally between him and his brother and he invited him to accompany him to a conference in Berlin. All this was to the good. But, as in so many other relationships in his life, Nash’s intentions weren’t always matched by the emotional means to carry them out satisfactorily. Even as he tried to draw his son closer, he said and did things that could only be called insensitive and alienating.34 He did not try to hide his own feelings of disappointment. He criticized his son’s appearance, calling him fat (which he is not). He criticized his son’s choice of profession, suggesting that nursing was beneath a son of his and urging him to go to medical school instead of pursuing a master’s in nursing. He hinted strongly that he hoped John would help care for his younger brother, but then angered him by saying it would do Johnny
good to be around a “less intelligent older brother.”35 Finally, he said he wanted John to change his name to Nash, a suggestion meant to be magnanimous, but which actually proved hurtful since it implied that he meant for John to renounce all that he was and had been. Eleanor, of course, felt injured.

  A few months later, Nash did take John Stier to Berlin with him. The tensions of their first reunion surfaced again.’36 Nash remorselessly needled his son about trifles, making him turn out the light when he wanted to read, not letting him order dessert, telling him not to eat butter or bread. Yet even so, John Stier felt great pride when Nash gave his lectures.37 And Nash was able to write to Harold Kuhn, “Berlin was a great experience … my son enjoyed the trip.”38

  • • •

  A Nobel award has a finality about it. Yet despite the unique honor, life continues beyond the fairytale celebration in Stockholm. More so than for other Laureates, Nash’s immediate future is uncertain. Nobody knows whether his remission is permanent. People have relapsed after many years of being symptom-free. The present is precious.

  Unlike a game of Hex, outcomes in real life aren’t predetermined by the first or even the fiftieth move. The extraordinary journey of this American genius, this man who surprises people, continues. The self-deprecating humor suggests greater self-awareness. The straight-from-the-heart talk with friends about sadness, pleasure, and attachment suggests a wider range of emotional experiences. The daily effort to give others their due, and to recognize their right to ask this of him, bespeaks a very different man from the often cold and arrogant youth. And the disjunction of thought and emotion that characterized Nash’s personality, not just when he was ill, but even before are much less evident today. In deed, if not always in word, Nash has come to a life in which thought and emotion are more closely entwined, where getting and giving are central, and relationships are more symmetrical. He may be less than he was intellectually, he may never achieve another breakthrough, but he has become a great deal more than he ever was — “a very fine person,” as Alicia put it once.