jethrien

Title: A Beautiful Mind: The life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash
Author: Sylvia Nasar
Genre: Biography (20th C scientists)
Thingummies: 3

Synopsis: John Nash was an arrogant, up-and-coming mathematical genius who abruptly spiraled into paranoid schizophrenia. After decades of haunting Fine Tower in Princeton, he managed to recover just in time to recieve a Nobel Prize. He actually looks surprisingly like Russell Crowe, it turns out.

Thoughts: Nasar does an excellent job of reconstructing the life of a living subject who nonetheless can't actually explain large chunks of his own life. It's an interesting look into the world of mathematicians, of which I've kind of lived on the periphery. Watching the growth of a psychological illness and the devastation it wreaks on multiple families does give a certain amount of insight on the process of "going mad".

Unfortunately, the story is not as engaging as one might hope for. The biggest problem, really, is that young Nash is a complete asshole. It's unclear how much of his earlier behavior is linked to his mental illness--it feels wrong to condemn someone for actions that they could not control. But the decades before his official break are full of behavior that is otherwise inexcusable. Nash is arrogant, cold, and anti-social, a vicious prankster who belittles nearly everyone he comes into contact with. He feels teaching undergrads to be beneath him, despite the fact that that was what he was explicitly hired to do, and pretty much deliberately screws them all over. He gets a girl pregnant, refuses to marry her, insists that she name the kid after him, plays house, but refuses to pay her hospital bills or any child support. He's every caricature of a boy wonder geek, with hopeless social skills and an aggressive ego, stretched into ridiculousness.

Also unfortunate is the fact that the climax of this story essentially takes place inside Nash's brain, where we can't go. It's a story of redemption, in which someone who has always trusted in logic and his own mind is betrayed by both, and then slowly works his way out again. Because there's no way to truly convey this process, the author instead skims over decades and then lavishes attention on the argument over whether to give him a Nobel. (The intro to the book runs through the entire story, I suppose with the assumption that you've already heard it and the point is to fill in the details, so there's not much in the way of tension.)

Ultimately, it's a well-done piece, so I can't give it less than the 3. But I didn't find it to be truly entertaining or enlightening, so can't really recommend it terribly strongly.