The true story of John Nash, which was much worse than what we were shown in A Beautiful Mind. A Beautiful Mind The Autobiography of John Nash

Guys, we put our soul into the site. Thank you for that
that you are discovering this beauty. Thanks for the inspiration and goosebumps.
Join us on Facebook And In contact with

The personality of John Nash became known to many people far from the world of science after publication big screen movie "A Beautiful Mind" starring Russell Crowe. To a certain extent, Hollywood cinema idealizes mathematics, as John himself mentioned after watching the film. Meanwhile, there is a more truthful and almost unknown documentary called Brilliant Madness."

We are in website decided to look at Nash's life from a different angle. The editors have read the book Mind Games, which contains much more biographical facts than in the film of the same name.

Youth and university studies

As a child, Nash hated math, and his grades in school were consistent. He himself says in his autobiography that everything changed after the book “Creators of Mathematics.” It was written so excitingly and clearly that after reading it he was able to independently prove one small theorem.

Of course, Nash entered the mathematics department, and before that he managed to gain knowledge in the field of chemical engineering and international economics. For his outstanding achievements upon graduation, John was given not only a bachelor's degree, but also a master's degree, and he went to conquer Princeton University. In Nash's pocket was recommendation from a former teacher, which briefly stated: “He is a math genius.”

Former classmates claim that John was obsessed with money and incredibly stingy. One day it got to the point that, following a comic advice, he went to look for a bank that would issue envelopes and stamps for free when servicing a current account. He was unable to find such an institution.

During his years of study, his first serious romance, which is not particularly known to the general public. The romantic relationship ended in a painful breakup. As a result of this relationship, John had a son, with whom he never interacted.

Despite the love affairs, Nash did not deviate one iota from the set course. He was 21 years old when he wrote his dissertation on game theory at Princeton. 45 years later, it was for this that he would receive the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Marriage and the first signs of illness

After finishing graduate school, John remained to teach at Princeton and worked part-time for private companies. He was 26 years old when police arrested him for indecent exposure. We don’t know the details of that story, but perhaps this incident was the first sign foreshadowing John’s mental problems. Moreover, for this oversight he lost his privileges at work: his security clearance was revoked.

A little later, John married his student Alicia Lard, who was only 4 years younger than him. A year later, Fortune magazine called Nash " rising star mathematics,” and the young wife became pregnant. At the same time, he began to show the first signs of schizophrenia.

The disease developed rapidly, and it became increasingly difficult to hide it from the public. The final straw came when Nash turned down the university's offer to become dean of the mathematics department. He stated that he did not intend to waste time on any nonsense and wanted to be the emperor of Antarctica.

John lost his job and was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and was forced to take medication for two months. After being discharged, he suddenly decided to go to Europe. Alicia left her newborn son with her parents and followed her husband. Nash tried to find political asylum, but was unable to do so. He was soon arrested and deported to the United States.

Separately, it is necessary to mention visual hallucinations, which play a large role in the film “A Beautiful Mind”. The real Nash never saw them, he only heard the voices. In addition, the mathematician had a lot of unfounded fears, which are also not reflected in the film. For example, when he saw red ties, he inevitably began to think that a participant in a communist conspiracy was standing in front of him.

Contrary to popular belief, John never worked for the Pentagon and did not search for encrypted messages from Russian or Japanese spies. True, he believed that the world was plotting against America, and therefore wrote personal letters to the US government. Without going into details, John convinced the state that it was necessary to use a fundamentally different method of encrypting information, and even proposed one. The amazing thing about the idea is that this is the method that is being used now, in our days. Then, of course, no one answered John’s letters.

Treatment with insulin coma and leaving the family

The disease developed. Aggressive treatment in mental hospitals did not produce any results. John talked about himself in the third person, constantly called former colleagues to talk about the latest crazy conspiracy theory, and was afraid of something.

When the situation finally got out of control, a distraught Nash was again admitted to the clinic. There he underwent a course of insulin coma therapy - this is the artificial introduction of a person into a coma using insulin. After his discharge, John's former colleagues offered him a job out of pity, but Nash refused and left for Europe again.

This trip was the last straw for Alicia. She divorced John and raised their son on her own. Unfortunately, already in adolescence it became clear that the boy also had schizophrenia. On his own recognition, he believed that the voices he heard belonged to God. The hallucinations were not only auditory, like my father's, but also visual.

Returning from his “trip,” Nash, with the help of his former colleagues, got a job at Princeton University and met a new psychiatrist who prescribed him gentle medications, not the ones he had to take in mental hospitals. The pills suppressed the symptoms of schizophrenia, and Nash began to reconnect with his ex-wife and son. The idyll did not last long: John was afraid that the medications were affecting the brain and the ability to think, and stopped taking them - the symptoms returned with renewed vigor.

At Princeton, Nash often wandered around the university like a ghost and wrote incomprehensible formulas on chalk boards. Because of this, the students nicknamed him the Phantom.

The fight against schizophrenia and two prestigious awards

Despite the illness becoming worse again, Alicia allowed Nash to move in with them. She believed that she committed betrayal when she divorced John. Perhaps it was this step that saved the brilliant mathematician from vagrancy, since, being divorced, he did not have his own home and often spent the night in hotels or with friends.

The disease only subsided in the 1980s. The doctors shrugged their shoulders in surprise, but the whole secret was that John, by an effort of his mind, forced himself not to pay attention to the symptoms and took up mathematics again. He no longer took medications.

However, there is a fly in the ointment in this story: it is known that in schizophrenics, symptoms become less and less obvious as they get older. Perhaps it was a natural process and no cure occurred.

In 1994, Nash received the Nobel Prize in Economics for a dissertation he wrote at age 21. John was not given the traditional lecture for such cases because they were afraid for his mental state. Instead, a seminar was organized with the participation of scientists in which they discussed John's contributions to game theory.

A few years later, Nash and Alicia remarried. Meanwhile, 38 years have passed since the divorce. And shortly before his death, Nash received the highest award in mathematics - the Abel Prize - and became the first and so far the only person in the world to receive two prizes at once - the Nobel and the Abel.

John and Alicia died on the same day and even in the same moment. In 2015, they were involved in a car accident. He was 86, Alicia was 82. Interestingly, it was all due to an accident: the couple were not wearing seat belts, and the driver of the car (who was wearing a seat belt) escaped with minor injuries. As you can see, the life of even a recognized genius can be ruined by one small mistake.

"A Beautiful Mind" ends on a positive note: an aged John receives the Nobel Prize, Alicia stands by his side, and they have a long and happy life. Share with us in the comments, to what extent do you think the image of Nash created in the film did not coincide with the real personality of the genius?

John Forbes Nash Jr., the brilliant Princeton University mathematician whose life was the basis for the Oscar-winning film “A Beautiful Mind,” died over the weekend along with his wife Alicia.

The police established that a taxi driver who lost control was to blame for the death of the 86-year-old scientist and his 82-year-old wife. The driver of a Ford Crown Victoria tried to overtake another vehicle on the left side and crashed into a guardrail. The accident occurred on the New Jersey Turnpike. New Jersey State Police spokesman Gregory Williams said in a comment to NJ.com that it appears the couple was not wearing seat belts. John and Alicia were thrown out of the taxi by the impact and died on the spot. The driver survived and was taken to hospital with minor injuries.

Just a few days earlier, John Nash received the Abel Prize from the hands of King Harald V of Norway - it is called the mathematical “Nobel Prize”. The $800,000 prize was awarded to Nash and his colleague Louis Nierenber, acknowledged giants of 20th-century mathematics, for “pioneering contributions to the theory of nonlinear differential equations with partial derivatives in the field of geometric analysis". As noted, each of the scientists worked on his own, but mathematicians provided big influence at each other, and the results of the work were long ahead of their time. Nirenberg and the Nash couple flew in from Oslo together, said goodbye at the airport and parted ways in a taxi. John and Alicia died on the way to their home in the suburbs of Princeton.

As you know, the Nobel Prize is not awarded to mathematicians. However, John Nash still became its laureate in the “Economics” category for his analysis of equilibrium in the theory of non-cooperative games.

In the mathematical community, there is an opinion that John Nash became famous thanks to the simplest of his works, while many of his developments are still inaccessible to the understanding of his colleagues.

He is widely known for his biopic A Beautiful Mind, in which Russell Crowe played the role of Nash. The film, which became a discovery in 2001, told the whole world that for most of his life the mathematical genius struggled with schizophrenia and remained a patient in psychiatric clinics for a long time. As often happens, in life everything was more complicated, more tragic, and more surprising than in the movies.

Creator of mathematics

John Forbes Nash Jr. was born on June 13, 1928, in Bluefield, West Virginia, into a strict Protestant family. His father was an electrical engineer and his mother was a teacher. in English and Latin. Little John did not do well at school, and did not like mathematics - it was taught too boringly. In a small provincial town he grew up far from scientific communities And high technology. However, the calling found him on its own.

When Nash was 14 years old, he read Eric T. Bell's book, The Makers of Mathematics. Having mastered what he had read, he was able to prove Fermat’s little theorem himself, without outside help. And soon he turned his room into a real laboratory, where he covered himself with books and conducted various experiments.

In 1945, John entered the Carnegie Polytechnic Institute in Pittsburgh and planned to become an engineer, like his father. He tried to study chemistry, but abandoned the idea. He didn't find the economics course interesting either. As a result, the gifted student fell deeply in love with mathematics and seriously took up number theory and Diophantine equations. And then he took on the “bargaining problem” that John von Neumann had left unsolved in his Game Theory and Economic Behavior.

By the time he entered Princeton, John Nash had earned bachelor's and master's degrees, and the institute's teacher, Richard Duffin, provided him with letter of recommendation, which consisted of just one line: “This guy is a genius.” At Princeton in 1949, at the age of 21, Nash defended his dissertation on game theory, which 40 years later would be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. He developed the basics scientific method, which had a special impact on the development of the world economy. Before 1953, he published four papers with in-depth analysis of non-zero-sum games. The situation he modeled would later be called “Nash equilibrium.”

Still from the movie “A Beautiful Mind”

An example of such a balance can be, for example, negotiations between trade unions and company management about increasing wages. Such negotiations can end either in a long strike and losses for both parties, or in a mutually beneficial agreement. Moreover, such an agreement cannot be violated by either party, since violation will lead to losses.

The scientist was unable to obtain political asylum in Europe and was persecuted by the State Department

From the 1950s, Nash worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and wrote a number of papers on real algebraic geometry and the theory of Riemannian manifolds. At the same time, he proved Nash's theorem on regular embeddings, which became one of the most important in differential geometry on manifolds.

Still from the movie “A Beautiful Mind”

Nash was a recognized genius, but his relationships with his colleagues did not work out. His works mathematically substantiated Karl Marx's theory of surplus value. During the witch hunt, such views in the United States seemed heretical. Therefore, when Nash's girlfriend, nurse Eleanor Stier, gave birth to a child, Nash refused to give him his name or provide any financial support - in order to protect mother and child from persecution by the McCartney Commission.

become Under pressure from circumstances, the mathematician moved to California, to the RAND Corporation, which was engaged in analytical and strategic developments for the US government. This corporation was known as a haven for dissidents, and Nash quickly became one of the leading experts in the field of cold war, using developments in game theory. However, he failed to get along at RAND. The scientist was fired after police arrested him for indecent behavior.

Shortly thereafter, Nash met El Salvadoran student Alicia Lard, and they married in 1957. Everything was going well, the couple was expecting a child, Fortune magazine named Nash a rising American star of new mathematics. He received an invitation to become one of the youngest professors at Princeton. However, the mathematician reacted to the invitation very strangely. “I cannot take this post. The throne of the Emperor of Antarctica awaits me."

For several months, Alicia, frightened by the symptoms of schizophrenia, tried to hide her husband's condition from his colleagues and friends. However, in the end, John had to be forcibly hospitalized in a private psychiatric clinic in the suburbs of Boston. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

Having escaped from the clinic with the help of a lawyer, Nash leaves for Europe. Alicia left her newborn son with her mother and followed her husband. Nash constantly talked about persecution, about messages from aliens that only he could decipher. The scientist tried to obtain political refugee status in France, Switzerland and the GDR and renounce American citizenship. However, under pressure from the US State Department, these countries refused asylum to the couple. It is now known that Nash was indeed under surveillance, and his appeals to the embassies of various countries were blocked. Some time later, the mathematician was arrested by the French police and deported to the United States. He settled in Princeton with Alicia, and she found a job. But John's condition worsened, he was afraid of everything, spoke about himself in the third person, wrote meaningless letters and talked to former colleagues about numerology and politics.

30 "dark" years ended with an inexplicable return to reality

In 1961, Alicia, John's mother and his sister, after much hesitation, decided to admit John to Trenton State Hospital in New Jersey for risky and cruel insulin therapy. After his discharge, his colleagues tried to get him a job, but John went to Europe again, this time alone. Soon Alicia divorced him.

Still from the movie “A Beautiful Mind”

Until 1970, Nash bounced around mental hospitals and periodically lived with his mother. One of the psychiatrists prescribed him the latest medications, which gave a visible improvement. But John refused to take them, fearing side effects.

For thirty “dark” years, Nash did not write a single article. There were rumors in the scientific world about his untimely death and about the lobotomy he suffered. And he himself considered himself the savior of the Universe and wandered in a world of illusions, blaming communists and mysterious enemies for his troubles.

After his mother's death, he turned to Alicia again and asked for shelter. To everyone's surprise, she agreed. So John ended up back in Princeton. Sometimes he walked around the university and left mysterious formulas and messages to nowhere on the boards in the classroom. The students nicknamed him the Ghost.

The film A Beautiful Mind reveals that Nash was never cured of schizophrenia - it is simply impossible - but learned to live with the disease. In fact, his return to real world in the early 1990s remained unexplained. He again began to reason logically, operate with mathematical expressions, and mastered the computer. Doctors said that age-related changes contributed to this. John himself is confident that he himself has learned to separate illusions from reality. And he took up science again.

Nash railed against "dirty" money and rebutted Adam Smith

In 1994, when Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize, the committee denied him the right to give the traditional laureate lecture out of concern for his fortune. However, subsequent years showed that the genius had not lost his sharpness of mind.

“I remained in the grip of illness long enough to finally abandon my delusional hypotheses and return to thinking of myself as an ordinary person and once again take up mathematical research,” Nash wrote in his autobiography. In 2011, he and Alicia got married again.

Nash was again given an office at Princeton, and he studied mathematics for the rest of his life. From time to time he was invited to give lectures in different countries. In 2013, the professor visited Kyrgyzstan and gave a lecture on ideal money in Bishkek.

Still from the movie “A Beautiful Mind”

“When we talk about money, we immediately think about how to spend it faster and have fun. We do not perceive money as a radio that can convey valuable and important information. If we take advantage of the possibilities of money, invest it in education or something else, then the money will double and enrich us,” the scientist said.

Nash was critical of capitalist policies that equate good money with dirty money. “You cannot assume that dirty money is better than honestly earned money. The new Japanese government adhered to this policy and is now disentangling Negative consequences. Japan wanted to reduce the prices of exported goods and wanted to artificially maintain the exchange rate of the national currency. The cost of goods has dropped and exports have really picked up. But in Japan itself, prices have risen, the exchange rate has fallen, and inflation is plaguing the economy,” he recalled.

John Nash advocated the creation of a worldwide financial organization like the International currency board, which will allow you to take and give loans not in money, but in goods.

The theories developed by Nash refuted Adam Smith's "every man for himself" idea and had a major impact on shaping the world economy. His work is actively used in the analysis of oligopoly - the behavior of a small number of competitors in certain sectors of the economy. In addition, his game theory works successfully in law, social psychology, sports and politics.

American mathematician and Nobel Prize winner in economics John Nash died in a car accident in New Jersey. He was 86 years old

John Nash (Photo: REUTERS 2015)

The death of the mathematician is reported by the Huffigton Post, citing a representative of the New Jersey police. The taxi in which Nash was traveling was involved in an accident. Riding in the car with him was his wife, 82-year-old Alicia Nash, who also died. As noted by local publication NJ.com, Nash and his wife were not wearing seat belts. The driver of the car survived and was taken to hospital.

Nash won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994 "for his fundamental analysis of equilibrium in the theory of noncooperative games." Noted was Nash's dissertation on game theory, which he wrote in 1949, at the age of 21.

Nash's life story became the basis for the plot of the film A Beautiful Mind, where Russell Crowe played the role of the scientist. The film won four Oscars, including Best Picture. The actor has already announced in his Twitter, who is shocked by the death of Nash and his wife. “An amazing union. Beautiful minds, beautiful hearts,” Crowe wrote.

Nash was born in 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia. In 1947, he entered Princeton University, by which time he already had bachelor's and master's degrees from the Carnegie Polytechnic Institute. Two years later, Nash wrote a dissertation on game theory that would be awarded the Nobel Prize in 1994.

In 1951, he went to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the mid-1950s, he worked briefly at RAND's strategic research center. In 1957, Nash married student Alicia Lard. Soon the scientist developed symptoms of schizophrenia. In 1959, Nash lost his job at MIT, and was soon admitted to a psychiatric clinic in Boston, where he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Nash divorced his wife in 1962 (they remarried in 2001).

Over time, Nash learned to live and work in conditions of serious illness, and continued to study mathematics. In 1994, Nash did not give his Nobel lecture at Stockholm University due to the organizers' concerns about his condition.

In his work in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Nash analyzed situations in which everyone in the game either wins or loses. According to Nash theory, players in a game can, in some cases, use an optimal strategy that leads to the creation of a stable equilibrium. It is beneficial for the parties to maintain balance, since any change will worsen their position. This situation is called “Nash equilibrium.” The results of Nash's research influenced the use of mathematical tools for economic modeling. The classic concept of the competition model, based on the teachings of Adam Smith, according to which “every man for himself” was revised. According to Nash, optimal strategies are those in which everyone acts both to benefit himself and to benefit others.

Realnoe Vremya observer's review of one of the main intellectual bestsellers of recent decades, the biography of a brilliant mathematician

There are books that are simply stunning in their description of how one can rise and fall and be reborn again. human mind. The story of John Nash, a brilliant mathematician and Nobel Prize winner, described by his biographer Sylvia Nazar in the book A Beautiful Mind, is so amazing and tragic that it seems written by a Hollywood screenwriter. Economic columnist for the online newspaper Realnoe Vremya Albert Bikbov waited a very long time for the release of this book here in Russia, and his expectations were more than justified - this is truly a masterpiece of a documentary biography of one of the greatest minds. “A Beautiful Mind” is how the title of the book is literally translated from English.

An exemplary book about genius

It is not surprising that the outstanding Hollywood film “A Beautiful Mind” by Ron Howard, based on the book in 2001 (but with very, very large distortions), with brilliant performances by actors Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly, became one of the best films in the history of cinema and received four Oscars. " Many of you have probably seen the film - this is one of the most beautiful and touching stories of madness, recovery, discovery, fame, uselessness, loneliness. If you haven't watched it, take the time, I assure you, it is truly an incredible film.

The book describes Nash's scientific achievements and his personal story in much more detail than in the film, and many surprises await the reader: life, as always, is much more complicated than the movies. And the more interesting...

A book by Sylvia Nasar called “A Beautiful Mind. The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash was published in the United States in 1998, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, was translated into 30 languages, and became an international bestseller. This book is both an example of modern scientific biography and an exceptionally fascinating read; it is a magnificent, exemplary (and therefore very convenient and most reader-friendly) American non-fiction.

This book is both an example of modern scientific biography and an exceptionally fascinating read. Photo: meduza.io

And only 18 years later, the book was finally translated into Russian and published in October 2016 by Corpus publishing house as part of the AST publishing group with a circulation of 3,000 copies. The book is quite voluminous - only 752 pages. But it's very easy to read. In online stores it costs about 710 rubles.

A little about the author of the book - Sylvia Nazar, an American economist, writer and journalist. Currently a professor of business journalism at Columbia University. On her father’s side she is Uzbek (which, by the way, Uzbeks are very proud of), and on her mother’s side she is German. From 1977 to 1980, she worked at the Institute of Economic Analysis, headed by the Nobel Prize laureate in economics, a native of Russia, Vasily Leontiev. Since 1991, she has worked as an economic correspondent for the New York Times. She left the newspaper in 1999, deciding to focus on teaching and writing. This book was written during her time at the New York Times. According to Sylvia Nazar, she saw Nashon the list of Nobel laureates in economics in 1994, rushed to the editor with this story - and the story moved him to tears. Over four years of work, Sylvia Nazar studied Nash’s biography so seriously and approached this work so responsibly that she even became part of the Nash family:

“It took hundreds of sources to reconstruct his entire life story. Not a single person knew all the details: neither Alicia (John Nash's wife) nor Nash's sons.

It turned out that from thousands of fragments and grains collected from hundreds of interviews, dozens of letters and a handful of documents, it is possible to piece together a single life story. Part of the role was played by the mathematical community, which - like the chorus in the ancient Greek theater - observed, commented, remembered, explained and created the background.

And, of course, this became possible because Alicia never stopped believing in miracles. Alicia wanted John's story to be told because it could be a source of support for people suffering from mental illness.

According to Sylvia Nazar, she saw Nashon the list of Nobel laureates in economics in 1994, rushed to the editor with this story - and the story moved him to tears. Photo russian.rt.com

But despite all this, Nash himself did not comment for Sylvia. “Dear Mrs. Nazar, I have decided to adhere to Swiss neutrality...” he wrote in his typical style.

John Nash, when filming the film based on the book, nevertheless advised director Ron Howard and actor Russell Crowe, and after Ron Howard showed the film to John and Alicia, Sylvia Nazar called them: “John, how are you?” She doesn't remember his exact words, but she remembers well that he mentioned three things that he liked: firstly, it was funny, secondly, the action developed dynamically, and John is an action movie buff. Thirdly... John said: "I think Russell Crowe looks a little like me."

Adam Smith is obsolete!

Of course, John Nash is known to the general public as the winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics for “Equilibrium Analysis in the Theory of Non-Cooperative Games” (along with Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi). Additionally, in 2015, John Nash received the highest honor in mathematics, the Abel Prize, for his contributions to the theory of nonlinear differential equations. Abel in mathematics and Nobel in economics - what a scale of genius! Nash was generally unique: he wrote very few works, and in each case, a separate work dramatically changed the understanding of the discipline.

Thus, according to many scientists, he received the Nobel Prize in Economics for just one page of text! We are talking about the famous paper “Equilibrium Points in N-person Games”, published in 1950 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This is probably the most powerful brevity of presentation and the highest paid (Nobel Prize!) text in the history of mankind.

In 2015, John Nash received the highest honor in mathematics, the Abel Prize, for his contributions to the theory of nonlinear differential equations. Photo royalcourt.no

In the article, Nash formulated the concept of abstract equilibrium for an abstract “game”, the simplest model strategic interaction - a situation in which a participant’s gain depends not only on what he himself does, but also on what other participants do. If, for the sake of clarity, we assume that each player makes only one move, all that is required is that, having chosen his move, the player does not want to reconsider his choice by looking at the choices of other players. Then the set of moves made by the players is a Nash equilibrium. This equilibrium, as Nash defined it, always exists in any strategic interaction. This is a very important property, because an economic model that describes reality must always have some kind of “equilibrium” - a state that, according to this model, can be realized in life if the model is adequate.

The Nash equilibrium, formulated in 1950, radically transformed the young science of game theory (a mathematical method for studying optimal strategies in games), which by that time was only six years old. The mathematical aspects and applications of game theory were first outlined in the classic 1944 book by John von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern, Game Theory and Economic Behavior. John Nash, at the age of 20, having become acquainted with this book in 1948, immediately saw what the enthusiastic revolutionary nature of this book could not see at first. general public. He immediately declared that this weighty book, for all its mathematical innovation, did not contain new fundamental theorems, with the exception of von Neumann's amazing minimax theorem. He came to the conclusion that the new theoretical constructions did not help von Neumann either solve any outstanding problem or significantly develop the theory itself. Zero-sum games (as formulated by von Neumann) are to game theory what the twelve-bar blues is to jazz: both an extreme case and a historical starting point. In 1949, John Nash, without much effort, found the very “Nash equilibrium” that immortalized him, which radically revolutionized not only game theory itself, but the entire economic science as a whole. At Princeton, while still a master's student, he boldly asked for an appointment with Professor von Neumann, who by that time was a world-famous star, participating in the American nuclear program and overseeing the nascent computer industry. Nash said that he had only just managed to say a couple of phrases to the professor when von Neumann interrupted him and sharply declared: “This is trivial. It's just a fixed point theorem." The genius von Neumann did not understand the other genius, stopping literally half a step from formulating the famous equilibrium!

In 1950, Nash formulated on eight pages in the article “The Bargaining Problem” a solution to a fair “division of the pie” (the problem of dividing the result of a transaction). But all economics struggled with this problem for several centuries to no avail! The main idea of ​​this article is that the outcome of a transaction depends on what its participants would have received if the transaction had not taken place, and on their potential benefits from concluding the transaction. Such a breakthrough forced mathematicians at Princeton University, where Nash studied, to take the young scientist and especially his “equilibrium” very seriously. He was recommended to urgently write a scientific dissertation on this topic (apparently, a one-page article - it was somehow too fantastically simple). John Nash, reluctantly and with alterations, wrote a dissertation in 1951 entitled “Non-cooperative Games.” On 28 pages! This dissertation was immediately published in the form of an article in the Annals of Mathematics. After this, the world became qualitatively different.

Human egoism ultimately leads not to the most optimal state, but to a fairly stable Nash equilibrium, which is not so optimal from the point of view of society. Adam Smith is obsolete! Photo historian.rf

John Nash's findings were revolutionary. Adam Smith believed that when each member of a group acts selfishly, pursuing his own interests, this leads to an efficient equilibrium state for that group. The principle was called the “invisible hand of the market.” This is the situation that maximizes overall benefit. Economists often call this state Pareto optimality (Pareto equilibrium). In Pareto equilibrium, any player's change in his mode of action will lead to a deterioration in the overall result. However, games in which each player pursues his own interests do not lead to Pareto optimality. They lead inexorably to a Nash equilibrium - a situation where it is unprofitable for any player to change the way he acts. John Nash showed that when each member of a group acts only in his own interests, this does not lead to the achievement of the maximum interests of the entire group.

In other words, human selfishness ultimately leads not to the most optimal state, but to a fairly stable Nash equilibrium, which is not so optimal from the point of view of society. Adam Smith is obsolete!

But what John Nash did in the field of game theory was truly appreciated only in the 80s. Today, game theory is in great demand. Most often, game theory methods are used in economics, and a little less often in other social sciences - sociology, political science, psychology, ethics, jurisprudence and others. Since the 1970s, it has been adopted by biologists to study animal behavior and the theory of evolution. It is very important for artificial intelligence and cybernetics, especially with interest in intelligent agents.

There is an excellent documentary film “Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom?”, produced by BBC, 2007.

The film is very leftist in content, but it relatively accurately shows how much Nash’s ideas influenced the whole world and formed the basis of the rigid ideology of neoconservatism, which has dominated the public consciousness since about the 1980s Western Europe, USA, and then in the Russian Federation.

There is almost universal agreement in the mathematical world that the short paper he wrote at age 21, for which he received the Nobel Prize, is the least of his achievements. Photo: math.cnrs.fr

32 years of madness

Oddly enough, there is almost universal agreement in the mathematical world that the short paper he wrote at age 21, for which he received the Nobel Prize, is the least of his achievements. He has been called one of the most original mathematical minds of the 20th century. After writing several pages on game theory (which are described above), he lost interest in this topic and switched to pure mathematics.

In the 50s, John Nash managed to make a fundamental breakthrough in the field of pure mathematics. He formulated and proved the so-called “Nash theorem”, which connected two different branches of science - algebraic and differential geometry. This result is called Nash's embedding theorem. For his work, he used the analysis of partial differential equations arising in such a problem. Before him, these systems were considered too complex, so they didn’t even really try to analyze them. Nash's idea that any variety can be described by a polynomial equation is in itself incredible - if only because it seems completely implausible that an infinite number of such diverse objects could be described so relatively in a simple way. It was this work that brought him the Abel Prize (the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize) in 2015.

The ease with which Nash “cracked” difficult mathematical problems eventually went to his head, and at the age of 30 he took aim at the “Holy Grail” of pure mathematics - the Riemann Hypothesis. The Riemann Hypothesis is one of the seven "Millennium Problems" in mathematics, each of which will receive a $1 million reward from the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the event of the publication of a counterexample to the Riemann hypothesis, the scientific council of the Clay Institute has the right to decide whether this counterexample can be considered a final solution to the problem, or whether the problem can be reformulated in a narrower form and left open (in the latter case, a small part of the reward may be paid to the author of the counterexample)

Interestingly, as of 2016, only one of the seven Millennium Problems (the Poincaré conjecture) has been solved (the Fields Medal for its solution was awarded to the Russian Grigory Perelman, who refused to accept it).

Only one of the seven millennium problems (the Poincaré conjecture) has been solved: the Fields Medal for its solution was awarded to the Russian Grigory Perelman. Photo lenta.co

The Riemann hypothesis (combined with a number of personal intimate problems described in the book) broke Nash. He was simultaneously working on some problems in quantum theory, and the workload turned out to be unbearable. Nash - an eccentric young genius, interlocutor of Einstein and von Neumann, a happy husband and young father, a daring bisexual in an era of total homophobia and one of the most promising scientists of his generation - at the age of 30 he goes crazy and for the next three decades plunges into the abyss of schizophrenia and paranoia.

The most severe diagnosis is paranoid schizophrenia. He wanders and begs, receives and deciphers “messages from aliens,” hides from the intelligence agencies supposedly spying on him, tries to establish (and also lead) a world government, and wanders like an ominous ghost around the campus of Princeton University. He went into restaurants barefoot. He had shoulder-length dark hair and a thick beard, a fixed expression on his face and a dead look. Women were especially frightened by this. He often talks to shadows, occasionally banging his head against the wall.

This is how Sylvia Nazar describes his condition in the book:

Hospitals. the hardest drug treatment(painful insulin therapy and Thorazine injections), wanderings and the state of a “zombie man” - all this is Nash’s life for no less than thirty-two years! 32 years of pure hell for one of the most beautiful minds on the planet. But the scientific world did not turn away from him; he was given the opportunity to “work” within the walls of Princeton University. The students giggle at him, calling him a “Phantom” who wanders mindlessly like a ghost within the university walls.

And then a real miracle happens.

Based on the book in 2001, the film A Beautiful Mind by Ron Howard with brilliant performances by actors Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly became one of the best films in the history of cinema and received four Oscars. Photo kino-kingdom.com

Renaissance

In 1990, John Nash returned to normal consciousness - he went through an amazing remission, which took several years. Nash is experiencing not only an intellectual, but also a spiritual rebirth - he becomes much more the best person than he was before the illness and, to the best of his ability, tries to rebuild what he once damaged or destroyed. He brings back the woman he loves, his wife Alicia.

Nobel Prize in 1994. The film “A Beautiful Mind” and worldwide fame. A well-deserved scientific retirement with honorary lectures and new prizes for work half a century ago. But at the same time, there is concern for his son, who has gone crazy in the same way.

And here his mathematical genius showed itself again - he owed his remission, having refused medications, to his completely uniquely formulated internal law of combating schizophrenic thoughts in his own head. He simply tested them for rationality and learned not to pay much attention to them. But it was very difficult for him - he often repeated “when you become normal, you lose touch with the cosmos, and therefore I am not happy about the recovery.”

John Nash died on May 23, 2015 (age 86) along with his wife Alicia Nash (age 83) in a car accident in New Jersey. The taxi driver in which the couple were traveling lost control while overtaking and crashed into the median barrier. Both unbelted passengers were thrown out upon impact, and arriving paramedics pronounced them dead at the scene. The taxi driver was taken to hospital with non-life threatening injuries. As they say: “Instant death with your beloved.” A fairy tale, not life.

Albert Bikbov

A wonderful film, Beautiful Mind, is based on the life of John Nash. As in any work of art, the film contains discrepancies with the facts. At the end of the film, Nash receives the Nobel Prize and makes an unforgettable speech at the award ceremony in Stockholm. An elderly scientist who comprehended the secrets of mathematics and spent his entire life fighting a terrible disease - schizophrenia, says that he achieved everything in life because of love - his love for his wife Alicia and her love for him.

Nash never made this speech. The procedure for awarding the Nobel Prize in Economics does not involve speeches by the laureates, although the scientist then went to Sweden. In May 2015, Nash traveled to Scandinavia again. This time he was invited to Norway, where King Harald V on Tuesday presented him and his colleague Louis Nirenberg with the Abel Prize for their contributions to the study of differential equations. There, in Norway, the organizers helped the Nash spouses fulfill their dream of recent years - to meet and communicate with world chess champion Magnus Carlsen.

On Saturday, Nash and his wife returned to America and took a taxi home from the airport. The driver of the Ford they were traveling in tried to overtake the Chrysler, lost control and crashed into a road barrier. The Nash couple were not wearing seat belts and were thrown from the car and died on the spot. The driver was taken to the hospital, his life is not in danger.

John Nash was born on June 13, 1928 in a small town in West Virginia into an ordinary American family. My father is an electrical engineer, my mother is a teacher who quit her job after getting married and having children. Even as a child, Nash additionally studied mathematics and at the university, after a short-term passion for chemistry, he devoted himself entirely to this science. When he graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 1948, his mentor gave him a recommendation to further his education and scientific research. The recommendation consisted of one sentence: “This man is a genius.” The talented young scientist was expected at Harvard, but he chose Princeton to be closer to his family.

It was at Princeton, as a 22-year-old boy (!), that Nash became interested in game theory and described the famous equilibrium, later called the “Nash equilibrium” in his honor. Nash proved that in any non-cooperative game (the so-called games where the exchange of information between participants is prohibited) there is a type of decision in which no participant can increase the payoff by changing his decision unilaterally, when other participants do not change their decisions. For a series of four papers on game theory, Nash received a PhD at the age of 22. History is silent about whether John's breakthrough in understanding game theory actually occurred when he was thinking about how he and his friends could better approach girls in a bar (so shown in the film), but most likely this is fiction. But it is definitely true that the basis of the GTO theory, which is now very fashionable in poker, is precisely the work of Nash, and pushbot situations are professionally analyzed only on the basis of the principles formulated by him.

He achieved great success in other areas of mathematics - his interests ranged from differential equations to singularity theory. In 2011, NSA (Agency National Security) declassified letters Nash wrote in the 50s of the 20th century - even then he foresaw many of the concepts underlying modern cryptography.

However, Nash's brilliant career encountered an unexpected obstacle. His first signs of mental illness appeared in 1954, when in the city of Santa Monica (California) for some reason he went to a gathering place for local homosexuals and there, roughly speaking, took off his pants. No charges were brought, but Nash was deprived of highest degree access to state secrets. For many years he was haunted by accusations of homosexuality (not confirmed by anything other than this case), the attitude towards which was far from being so loyal in those years. A dark spot on the genius’s biography was his relationship with nurse Elinor Steer - he left her after learning about her pregnancy, and refused to take financial part in the life of their son John David (the film “A Beautiful Mind” was later condemned for not mentioning this fact ). However, Nash soon found his personal happiness - in the university music library, he met a student named Alicia who had moved to the United States from El Salvador and married her in 1957. “He was very smart and very handsome,” Alicia recalled.

Unfortunately, in 1959, while Alicia was pregnant, John Nash's health took a turn for the worse. He developed paranoid fears - for example, all people in red ties seemed to him to be participants in a communist conspiracy. He also had other hallucinations, mostly audio ones; Nash did not actually have the visual hallucinations so vividly shown in the film. At one of the lectures, he began to say something unimaginable, and his colleagues realized that something was wrong with him. Alicia had no choice but to put her husband in the hospital; he was given terrible diagnosis- paranoid schizophrenia. Nash lost his job and spent much of his time in private and public psychiatric hospitals. Like almost any schizophrenic, he denied his illness; He had to be forcibly admitted to the clinic, which could not but affect the relationship with his wife. Despite Alicia's incredible devotion to her husband (their child was unnamed for a year as she waited for Nash to leave the hospital and say what name he liked), they divorced in 1962.

Nevertheless, Nash's loved ones continued to help, although he could, after being discharged from the clinic, suddenly leave for Europe, leaving them in complete ignorance and only occasionally sending illegible telegrams. The scientist himself tried to help himself - realizing that he was sick (in the film this happens in one of the most powerful scenes - Nash understands that the girl who constantly appears to him is not growing up, and therefore cannot be real), he set himself the goal of rationally analyzing his condition and try to learn to cope with it. Over time, he succeeded - despite completely refusing to take antipsychotics, in the 70s his condition began to improve, and since then he has not been admitted to the hospital. His ex-wife at that time played a big role in improving the professor’s condition - she welcomed him home again and provided him with the opportunity to “live a quiet life,” which in her opinion was a key factor for recovery.

Nash himself criticized the film based on his life for the fact that it main character- for playing this role, Russell Crowe received BAFTA and Golden Globe awards, and was also nominated for an Oscar - still takes some experimental medications. He blamed this on the screenwriter, who, it seemed to him, was afraid that mentally ill people under the influence of the film would refuse to take their prescribed medications, trying to imitate the hero of A Beautiful Mind. John Nash in his autobiography described his way of dealing with mental disorder: “Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the illusory lines of thinking that had previously characterized my condition. Most notably, this began with the rejection of politically oriented thinking, since such an approach was a pointless waste of intellectual effort. Nowadays, it seems to me that I think rationally, as scientists tend to do. “I wouldn’t say it gives me the joy that anyone recovering from a physical illness experiences,” Nash continues. “Sound thinking limits man’s ideas about his connection with the cosmos.”

In the late 70s, Nash began to gradually return to work, and in the late 80s, he began to use by email to communicate with working mathematicians. They say that many of them were shocked to receive a letter from “that same Nash.” However, it was young colleagues who confirmed to the Nobel Committee that John Nash’s mental state had returned to normal, and awarding him the prize would not harm its reputation.

The outstanding scientist became known to the general public in beginning of XXI century. In 1998, journalist Sylvia Nazar wrote a biography of the scientist, A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash; the book was highly praised by critics and nominated for the prestigious Pulitzer Prize. The book came across to producer Brian Grazer, and before he could finish reading it, he contacted the author and acquired the rights to the film adaptation. He involved screenwriter Akiva Goldsman in the creation of the film (it was he who came up with the idea of ​​not explaining to the audience for the time being that part of what the main character sees is just a hallucination) and director Ron Howard. The casting was also successful - unexpected choice on main role Russell Crowe, fresh from starring in Gladiator, earned him his third Oscar nomination for Best Actor in a row; Jennifer Connelly performed brilliantly in the role of Nash's wife, Alicia. Film critic Roger Ebert wrote: “...Jennifer Conelly shines as Alicia. While Crowe has the larger role, it's Connelly's multifaceted performance as a woman torn between love and fear for the same man that elevates the film to new heights."

The film Beautiful Mind was liked not only by critics, but also by ordinary viewers - it grossed more than $300 million at the global box office - and received four Oscar awards, including in the main categories - Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay”, as well as “Best Supporting Actress” for Jennifer Connelly.

Despite the excitement, the Nash couple continued to live an ordinary “quiet” life. In 2001 they got married again. "We thought it was good idea. After all, we’ve been together most of our lives,” said Alicia. They watched their favorite series “Doctor Who” together, John studied science to the best of his ability, continued to travel with lectures and receive awards around the world; Alicia provided for the life of her brilliant husband and their son, John Charles Martin Nash. Unfortunately, the family was not spared a repeated drama - the son turned out to have the same illness as his father - schizophrenia. Last years The Nashes were actively involved in social activities aimed at preserving and developing programs to support people with mental illnesses, which give such patients the opportunity to live outside of clinics. Alicia Nash explained her participation in this work simply: “When I’m gone, will Johnny have to live on the street?”

Alicia Nash was with her husband until the last minute of his life, confirming the validity of what Sylvia Nazari wrote in the book: “Nash’s genius is that he chose a woman thanks to whom he could survive.” Their son was less fortunate.

John and Alicia Nash are remembered around the world today. “We are shocked and saddened to hear of the untimely passing of John Nash and his wife and great champion, Alicia. "John's extraordinary achievements inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and scientists who were influenced by his brilliant work in game theory, and the story of his life with Alicia touched millions of readers and film fans who admired their courage in the face of great adversity," said Princeton's president. Christopher Eisgruber.

"Rest in peace, beautiful Nobel laureate John Nash and his wonderful wife Alicia. It was an honor to tell part of their story."