Salon | Excerpt: A Beautiful Mind


Fiction Birds of America By Lorrie Moore Excerpt_\|_Review The Voyage of the Narwhal By Andrea Barrett Excerpt_\|_Review Blindness By José Saramago Excerpt_\|_Review Starting Out in the Evening By Brian Morton Excerpt_\|_Review Thirst By Ken Kalfus Excerpt_\|_Review Nonfiction The Professor and the Madman By Simon Winchester Excerpt_\|_Review A Beautiful Mind By Sylvia Nasar Excerpt_\|_Review At Home With the Marquis de Sade By Francine du Plessix Gray Excerpt_\|_Review A Slant of Sun By Beth Kephart Excerpt_\|_Review We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families By Philip Gourevitch Excerpt_\|_Review - - - - - - - - - - - Table Talk Join the Books discussion in Table Talk. - - - - - - - - - - -				__________________e__x__c__e__r__p__t ________________________- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - A Beautiful Mind BY SYLVIA NASAR NONFICTION SIMON & SCHUSTER 388 PAGES No one was more obsessed with originality, more disdainful of authority, or more jealous of his independence. As a young man he was surrounded by the high priests of twentieth-century science -- Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener -- but he joined no school, became no one's disciple, got along largely without guides or followers. In almost everything he did -- from game theory to geometry -- he thumbed his nose at the received wisdom, current fashions, established methods. He almost always worked alone, in his head, usually walking, often whistling Bach. Nash acquired his knowledge of mathematics not mainly from studying what other mathematicians had discovered, but by rediscovering their truths for himself. Eager to astound, he was always on the lookout for the really big problems. When he focused on some new puzzle, he saw dimensions that people who really knew the subject (he never did) initially dismissed as naive or wrong-headed. Even as a student, his indifference to others' skepticism, doubt, and ridicule was awesome. Nash's faith in rationality and the power of pure thought was extreme, even for a very young mathematician and even for the new age of computers, space travel, and nuclear weapons. Einstein once chided him for wishing to amend relativity theory without studying physics. His heroes were solitary thinkers and supermen like Newton and Nietzsche. Computers and science fiction were his passions. He considered "thinking machines," as he called them, superior in some ways to human beings. At one point, he became fascinated by the possibility that drugs could heighten physical and intellectual performance. He was beguiled by the idea of alien races of hyper-rational beings who had taught themselves to disregard all emotion. Compulsively rational, he wished to turn life's decisions -- whether to take the first elevator or wait for the next one, where to bank his money, what job to accept, whether to marry -- into calculations of advantage and disadvantage, algorithms or mathematical rules divorced from emotion, convention, and tradition. Even the small act of saying an automatic hello to Nash in a hallway could elicit a furious "Why are you saying hello to me?" His contemporaries, on the whole, found him immensely strange. They described him as "aloof," "haughty," "without affect," "detached," "spooky," "isolated," and "queer." Nash mingled rather than mixed with his peers. Preoccupied with his own private reality, he seemed not to share their mundane concerns. His manner -- slightly cold, a bit superior, somewhat secretive -- suggested something "mysterious and unnatural." His remoteness was punctuated by flights of garrulousness about outer space and geopolitical trends, childish pranks, and unpredictable eruptions of anger. But these outbursts were, more often than not, as enigmatic as his silences. "He is not one of us" was a constant refrain. SALON \| Dec. 21, 1998 Sylvia Nasar is an economics correspondent for the New York Times. She lives in Tarrytown, N.Y. From A Beautiful Mind" by Sylvia Nasar.© 1998 by Francine Sylvia Nasar. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster Inc. "A Beautiful Mind": ORDER A COPY__\|__SALON REVIEW - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - G O+T O+\| Fiction Awards \| Nonfiction Awards - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.