How a mathematician managed to defeat his own schizophrenia: "A Beautiful Mind" by John Nash

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

- wrote the great mathematician and amazing person John Nash in his autobiography. He became the first scientist in the world to receive both the Nobel and Abel prizes, as well as, probably, the only patient who independently learned to live with a terrible diagnosis, which, undoubtedly, should have closed his opportunity to engage in science.

Growing up in a strict Protestant family, John did not like mathematics from childhood. In America of the 30s, this science was taught, of course, at school, but young Nash was not lucky with a teacher, the lessons were boring and long, so the boy was more willing to do anything, just not boring tasks. Everything changed at the age of 14, when an amazing book fell into his hands, which became a truly real teacher. Eric T. Bell's popular edition of The Creators of Mathematics managed to captivate John so much that many years later he wrote:. This is how the path of the great scientist began. However, at first, the talented young man managed to attend courses in chemistry and economics at the Carnegie Polytechnic Institute. It was only later that I realized that after all, his real vocation is the exact sciences. To enter Princeton University, a student traveled with the world's shortest letter of recommendation from an institute teacher:.

It is surprising that at the age of 20, John found and developed the material for which he would then receive the Nobel Prize, but this will happen only 45 years later. The main topic that interested the talented young scientist was game theory - an unusual branch of mathematics, which, after decades, turned out to be incredibly popular in many areas, especially in economics. The 1950s were incredibly fruitful for John Nash: he wrote many revolutionary works for his time, studied the possibility of "noncooperative equilibrium" in the field of non-zero sum games, which in science is now called "Nash equilibrium". In 1957, the 30-year-old scientist married a beautiful student, Alicia Lard. In July 1958, Fortune magazine named Nash America's rising star in the "new math," and his young wife informed her happy husband that she was expecting a baby.

However, despite a happy personal life and a promising career, John Nash was in for trouble, worse than which for a scientist is not present. As an artist losing his sight, the young scientist began to lose his main "tool" - the ability to objectively assess reality. The symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia could not be recognized in the early stages, because scientists are strange people, they can be absent-minded, and mood swings, and unusual thoughts. When Alicia noticed that her husband was constantly afraid of something, talks about himself in the third person and sends meaningless messages by mail, she tried to hide it from others for the first time, but the disease progressed, and after a couple of years John lost his job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology … Then the years of the hardest upheavals for a small family dragged on: compulsory treatment, then an unsuccessful attempt to flee to Europe and obtain refugee status, deportation back to the United States and another treatment in a clinic. She again escaped for several years overseas, after which Alicia had to decide on a divorce - she had a small child in her arms, whom she raised and raised alone.

Fortunately, in the fate of John Nash there was a place not only for the courageous struggle of a person with a physical illness. She also became a story of true friendship and loyalty. His acquaintances, who remembered the young talented scientist from university years, began to help the brilliant mathematician, despite the fact that a couple of years ago he tortured them all with crazy telephone conversations and discussions about numerology. He was given a job at the university and had a meeting with the best psychiatrist who prescribed antipsychotic medications. The 70s became a period of a little respite - medications helped, John began to communicate with his family again, and Alicia, who had been tormented by the fact that she had abandoned her sick husband for all the years, returned to him. According to her acquaintances, without her, the great mathematician would simply turn into a homeless vagabond in the end. It seemed that with the help of modern medicine, this person would still be able to improve his life. Princeton students during these years became accustomed to a half-crazy eccentric whom they called "The Phantom." The great mathematician came to the alma mater every day, walked along the corridors, wrote on the blackboards the formulas that he only understood. He was not aggressive, but what he did was hardly scientific research.

Gradually, a simple, but at the same time terrible thought began to reach the scientist: psychotropic drugs helped to cope with schizophrenia, but they clearly slowed down mental activity. He could exist next to loved ones, but he could not work. Then John Nash made a uniquely bold decision - he refused to take medications and was left alone with his ailment. A few years later, a hopelessly ill person was able to perform a miracle - he coped with the auditory hallucinations that most annoyed him, learned to just ignore them, and in the end managed to separate the real world from the fictional one and returned to work. It is probably impossible for healthy people to fully imagine what it actually cost him, and what an incredible desire to live and work one had to possess for such an inner feat.

The scientist returned to Princeton again, where he continued, already fully, to study mathematics. On October 11, 1994, Nash received the Nobel Prize in Economics "For Equilibrium Analysis in the Theory of Noncooperative Games," and in 2015, the Abel Prize, the highest in mathematics, was added to this award, after which John these two highest awards. In 2001, 38 years after their divorce, John and Alicia got married again. In 2008, the great scientist visited Russia and made a presentation at the Graduate School of Management of St. Petersburg State University. It is surprising that, despite a difficult condition requiring constant monitoring, John Nash successfully lectured to students and colleagues for the rest of his life. True, as a person who has cognized different states of consciousness, he fell in love with the theme of cosmology.

John Nash became one of the few people to whom real monuments were created during his lifetime - not from stone from bronze, but literary and cinematic. In 1998, a book-biography of the great scientist “Mind Games. The life story of John Nash, a brilliant mathematician and Nobel Prize winner. The author is a talented journalist and professor at Columbia University Sylvia Nazar received the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for her, and the film "A Beautiful Mind", filmed since 2001, won four Oscars. Russell Crowe played the role of a brilliant mathematician. Although, according to the author of the book, the filmmakers did not very accurately adhere to the facts from the biography,.

John and Alicia passed away on May 23, 2015. There was a tragic accident - a car accident in which both spouses died on the spot, and the driver escaped with scratches. You can, of course, call this death terrible, however, given their advanced age (John Nash was already 87 years old at that time, and Alicia was 83), one can say in another way:

Another extravagant Nobel laureate - Rita Levi-Montalcini, lived to be 103 years old, without losing her love for life