FOCUS PERSONALITY Sudha Devi Nayak
Touching the highs and lows, Nash’s life seems to have the
transcendent qualities of a ‘Greek myth and Shakespearean tragedy’
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The famed mathematician and Nobel Laureate John Nash died tragically
in a car crash in New Jersey recently. He rounded off his meteoric
rise by winning the Abel Prize for mathematics awarded to him at Oslo,
Norway. Dr. Nash was defined by a beautiful mind that inspired a
generation of economists and scientists.
A one-sentence letter in support of his application to a Princeton
Doctoral Programme, ‘This man is a genius’, says it all. Barry
Mazur, professor of mathematics at Harvard University says, “Jane
Austen wrote six novels. I think Nash’s pure mathematical models are
on that scale.” Already a legend by age 30, his brilliant career was
cut short by schizophrenia, but after three decades of mental illness
he bounced back and went on to win the Nobel for Economics. Touching
the highs and lows, Nash’s life seems to have the transcendent
qualities of a “Greek myth and Shakespearean tragedy”.
The mathematician with movie-star looks, Olympian fit and an arrogance
born of a superior intellect had a chequered life, great achievement,
devastating loss and almost miraculous redemption that is the stuff of
Sylvia Nasar’s novel A Beautiful Mind. Nasar, a professor of
journalism at Columbia University, won the Pulitzer Prize for the
brilliant biography. Her book is an examination of his personality,
his struggle with schizophrenia, his delusions, frequent auditory
hallucinations, messages from television and newspapers and
extraterrestrial sources — and the resultant stress on his personal
and professional relationships. She spent three years in painstaking
research, piecing together information, interacting with hundreds of
friends and colleagues, scouring medical journals and mathematical
texts and other documents. She reconstructed his life, his genius, his
breakdown, recovery, selfless love and loyalty of a beautiful wife and
the Mathematics community, the ultimate reward, to the reader. The
novel ends with Dr. Nash’s receipt of the Nobel Prize. Truly, a labour
of love.
Nash’s game theory went on to revolutionise Economics, won him the
Nobel after the Nobel committee’s initial hesitation to award the
prize to someone whose sanity was in doubt at some time. “It is a
conceptually simple but powerful tool for analyzing a wide range of
competitive situations from corporate rivalries to legislative
decision- making.” A wonderful phrase has been coined about his work,
“the reasonable effectiveness of mathematics”, which means the same
idea can be applied again and again with more and more powerful
results.
Dr Nash had said that his quest took him to beyond the physical,
metaphysical and delusional and he came back to say, ”I have made the
most important discovery of my career, the most important discovery of
my life. It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic
or reasons can be found. “
After his death, in an interview to The Washington Post, Sylvia Nasar
said, “The ending was senseless because it was completely random…..
His life should not have ended the way it did but it is not the end
that is going to be remembered.” She went on to say Dr Nash’s
mathematical theories had their practical application in environmental
issues, economic and social problems, and the Federal Reserve Policy
which revolves round managing expectations of companies, consumers and
Central Banks.
The story of Dr. Nash is the story of the human mind, its ultimate
triumph over unforeseen tragedy through the healing power of love.
What has been brought to us in this biography is the man and
mathematician, whose legend will survive his death, in the usefulness
of his theories and formulae in every-day occurrence and whose
struggle in his personal and professional lives will pass on to
generations a sense of his indomitable spirit. “People look to the
order of numbers when the world falls apart,” says Nasar in her book A
Beautiful Mind.
