Today, a terrible story with a happy ending. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
On October 11, 1994, John
Forbes Nash, Jr. won the Nobel Prize for pioneering
work in game theory. Nash was 66 and, for most of
his adult life he'd suffered from paranoid
schizophrenia.
Nash began his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1948 -- when
he was just 20. While he was still only 21, he
wrote a 27-page doctoral dissertation on game
theory -- the mathematics of competition. The great
John von Neuman, then at Princeton, had treated
win-lose competitions. Now Nash showed how to
construct mathematical scenarios in which both
sides won. He found stable scenarios where no
person continues to profit from competition.
Nash put a whole new face on competition, and he
drew the attention of theoretical economists. They
turned game theory into a tool. This young genius
brought the field to fruition.
He went on to MIT and for eight years dazzled the
mathematical world. He worked in economics. He even
invented the game of Hex, marketed by Parker
Brothers. He married in 1957. New York Times writer
Silvia Nasar tells how "Fortune
magazine singled him out in July 1958 as America's
brilliant young star of the 'new mathematics.'"
Everything was coming up roses for John Nash.
Then, disaster! Mental illness wrapped about him
like an evil cloud. He began hearing voices. He'd
once astonished mathematicians with his unlikely
results. Now his results stopped making sense, and
the dividing line wasn't clear at first. He began
looking for secret messages in numbers. He
disappeared for days. He could, in Nasar's words,
"no longer sort and interpret sensations or reason
or feel the full range of emotions."
Freudian psychologists of the '50s claimed that his
wife's pregnancy had tipped him over the edge. Nice
thing to lay on a woman already stressed to the
edge by her husband's collapse! The marriage ended;
but she housed him, back in Princeton.
For 25 years, mental illness owned John Nash. He
became a ghost, wandering the halls of Princeton
and suffering in some private Hell. It was in the
mid-1980s that Nash at last learned to manage the
demon and, once again, he could do mathematics.
Meanwhile, game theory had become a staple tool of
business and economics. All the writing in that
field points back to Nash's seminal work. Finally,
Nash received the Nobel Prize in economics. Nobel
Prize winners usually have a political constituency
in their corner. All Nash had was his own merit.
Today, he's working on novel uses of the computer.
Princeton has given him a research post. Nash has
survived what looked like death. And we're left
looking at mental illness far more compassionately
-- and far more realistically.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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