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| A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash | 
 enlarge | Author: Sylvia Nasar
Publisher: Touchstone
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
Buy New: $0.01
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Avg. Customer Rating:  (286 reviews)
Sales Rank: 216242
Languages: English (Original Language), English (Unknown), English (Published)
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 464
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.2
Dimensions (in): 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 0743224574
Dewey Decimal Number: 510.92
EAN: 9780743224574
ASIN: 0743224574
Publication Date: December 4, 2001
Release Date: November 27, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
How could you, a mathematician, believe that extraterrestrials were sending you messages?" the visitor from Harvard asked the West Virginian with the movie-star looks and Olympian manner. "Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did," came the answer. "So I took them seriously." Thus begins the true story of John Nash, the mathematical genius who was a legend by age thirty when he slipped into madness, and who -- thanks to the selflessness of a beautiful woman and the loyalty of the mathematics community -- emerged after decades of ghostlike existence to win a Nobel Prize and world acclaim. The inspiration for a major motion picture, Sylvia Nasar's award-winning biography is a drama about the mystery of the human mind, triumph over incredible adversity, and the healing power of love.
Amazon.com Review
Stories of famously eccentric Princetonians abound--such as that of chemist Hubert Alyea, the model for The Absent-Minded Professor, or Ralph Nader, said to have had his own key to the library as an undergraduate. Or the "Phantom of Fine Hall," a figure many students had seen shuffling around the corridors of the math and physics building wearing purple sneakers and writing numerology treatises on the blackboards. The Phantom was John Nash, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his generation, who had spiraled into schizophrenia in the 1950s. His most important work had been in game theory, which by the 1980s was underpinning a large part of economics. When the Nobel Prize committee began debating a prize for game theory, Nash's name inevitably came up--only to be dismissed, since the prize clearly could not go to a madman. But in 1994 Nash, in remission from schizophrenia, shared the Nobel Prize in economics for work done some 45 years previously.Economist and journalist Sylvia Nasar has written a biography of Nash that looks at all sides of his life. She gives an intelligent, understandable exposition of his mathematical ideas and a picture of schizophrenia that is evocative but decidedly unromantic. Her story of the machinations behind Nash's Nobel is fascinating and one of very few such accounts available in print (the CIA could learn a thing or two from the Nobel committees). This highly recommended book is indeed "a story about the mystery of the human mind, in three acts: genius, madness, reawakening." --Mary Ellen Curtin
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| Customer Reviews: Read 281 more reviews...
 the book behind the movie December 1, 2008
A well written informatiive book. Deals with the closeness of madness and genuis, not just in John Nash. Facinatingly chronicles a period in time when all the rules were changing!
Complex Man-A Bio That Runs True October 22, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A while back I was glancing through one of my wife's magazines and found this article on John Nash. I read with interest and inexplicably began staring at one of the photos. "Oh, my God!" I recognized him. D floor. Firestone Library at Princeton University. For a while I had studied there rather steadily and spent a fair amount of time on D floor - coke machines and chatter. John Nash used to show up there fairly regularly and saw me as well. There was some gossip from the other D floor patrons about a professor in whose life something had gone wrong. Eventually Mr. Nash started to talk to me and started to show me books he was reading. I was fairly young and quite honestly became uncomfortable and uneasy for various reasons and did not promote future contacts although now I wish I had. Mr. Nash's life is fascinating to me, and I salute his achievements and recommend this book.
 Mathematician-bio or creepy gay p*rn, you decide October 10, 2008
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
Here are typical descriptive passages from A Beautiful Mind. My comments are in square brackets.
Description of Nash: "He had the build... of an athlete, 'a very strong, very muscular body,' one fellow graduate student recalled. He was, moreover, 'handsome as a god,' according to another student... His hair flopped over his forehead; he was constantly brushing it away. He wore his fingernails very long, which drew attention to his rather limp and beautiful hands and long, delicate fingers." [I do find very long fingernails so fetching on a man. He is the very model of a modern major general.]
There are similar descriptions of other mathematicians. For example a professor of Geometry is described as having the "body of a gymnast." [Just the indispensable thing for a professor of Geometry. One cannot help but picture him doing cartwheels in the lecture hall to illustrate a rotating pentagon.]
Another mathematician, Artin, is described as follows: "Slender, handsome, with ice-blue eyes and a spellbinding voice, Artin looked like a 1920s German matinee idol. He wore a black leather trench coat and sandals throughout the academic year, wore his hair long and smoked incessantly... He was well known for screaming and throwing chalk at students." [Sound like a matinee idol to you? ... or like Gary Numan on Benzedrine.]
The book is pathological, diagnostic of the author's (somebody named Sylvia Nasar) insanity. Also, Nasar includes lengthy technical accounts of mathematical ideas without any attempt at explication, leaving the reader to think, "Deep stuff, I guess..." She also describes in words a board game Nash allegedly invented ("Hard evidence of his genius") without any diagram of the board, the starting array of playing pieces. She seems to want the reader to get aload of this board game (modestly named "Nash") but is so incapable of straight thinking that she does not just provide a diagram, showing you how to make a board and play it. The reader is left clueless. Nasar is an example of ordinary madness of the very lowest water.
Reads like a novel September 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
(Spoiler alert) The book wasn't anything like the movie, but an excellent and engaging read. Nasar does a thorough job of including an adequate amount of detail about the influences in Nash's life without getting too bogged down in name dropping (the list of influences is interesting). The progression of his life, as told in the book, and the events that shaped his influence in the fields of mathematics and economics, all leading to his Nobel Prize award are put together well to keep the story moving. A fast-paced, compelling read.
Two minor criticisms were the omission of occasional details about who people were or specifics of some events the reader was expected to be familiar with, and the lack of explanation about some of the theorems and proofs Nash worked with that would have provided additional insight into the level of his genius (but might also have weighed the book down).
Overall, "A Beautiful Mind" is a very worthwhile read and exciting, non-mainstream biography.
An Opinion of "A Beautiful Mind" from a fellow schizophrenic July 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I read this book about two weeks ago, and I couldn't put it down. Maybe my opinion is biased because I have schizophrenia myself, but I found this story to be particularly encouraging in terms of my own recovery. The genius John Nash refused the coercive treatments of psychiatry and recovered naturally as some people do. I think it's sad that John could never reach the height of his mathematical genius again, after his illness, but it's still a hopeful story because he made a complete recovery, in my opinion. This book explains the mysterious and challenging symptoms of a misunderstood illness, and it also tells a tale of a person with the classic schizophrenic personality. It seems Nash was predisposed to the illness, and his behavior leading up to his first episode is characteristic of they typical schizophrenic. The difference between Nash's story and those of so many others with this difficult illness is that John was a true genius, became mad, and then recovered through sheer willpower. I think this book challenges the prevailing biopsychiatric model of schizophrenia and demonstrates that people can indeed recover without the use of toxic psychiatric drugs. You can also learn a lot about the politics of the Nobel Prize in this book.
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