August 3, 1998

John Nash: Paranoid, schizophrenic -- but Nobel laureate

By Kaushik Basu

John Nash was, arguably, a genius. He certainly believed he was one. Most of his papers in game theory -- the work for which he won the Nobel Prize in economics -- were written by the time he was 25. Subsequently, he wrote some fundamental papers in mathematics and theoretical physics. But it all ended by the time he was in his late 20s. Nash began suffering from delusions. At the age of 30 he had to be confined to a mental asylum. For the next 30 years he was in and out of mental homes, unable to work and incapable of relating to people; a hostage to the demons in his head, paralysed by fear and paranoia.

Unlike other Nobel laureates in economics, Nash was not prodigious. Depending on how one counts, he wrote a total of three or four papers in economics and game theory. But these papers grew to be classics. When a group of self-seeking individuals interact -- for instance, several producers of some commodity deciding how to set prices and what marketing strategy to follow -- what outcome can we expect? Nash described a general method for locating the outcome, which came to be known as the "Nash equilibrium". This and the "Nash bargaining solution" became standard tools of modern economic analysis.

In classrooms and seminars, people talked about the properties of the Nash equilibrium and used his ideas. Yet, very few knew anything about the reclusive man behind this work.

By the late '80s, his mental illness seemed to be in partial remission, as often happens with schizophrenia. He could be seen pacing the yards of Princeton University or sitting in the "dinky" train, travelling back and forth between Princeton and Princeton Junction absorbed in his own thoughts. I was a visiting professor at Princeton in 1989. While the regular faculty there was quite used to him and so had ceased to notice him, another visiting professor, Jorgen Weibull, and I found it unbearable that the man behind the Nash equilibrium which we talked about so much in class was the solitary figure out there.

So, through the perseverance of Weibull, we managed to set up a lunch appointment with Nash. It was an unremarkable afternoon. We were tense, given his genius. He was too, probably because of his shyness.

He seldom made eye contact with us. There was no sign of his early arrogance. He spoke softly and seemed sad and vulnerable. One wanted to reach out to him. That was the last time I saw Nash, but Weibull kept in touch with him. By the early '90s, the Nobel committee began deliberating whether it should give Nash the economics prize. Was he well enough to receive and appreciate the honour? Some argued he was essentially a mathematician and so should not get the economics prize.

Others argued that though his passion was for mathematics, his contributions had turned out to be too important for economic theory for him to be denied the award. In 1994, the announcement came. John Nash -- along with two other game-theorists, John Harsanyi and Reinhart Selten -- had been conferred the Nobel.

Once that happened, the glare of publicity was impossible to avoid. Now, with the publication of A Beautiful Mind, his biography by New York Times journalist Sylvia Nasar, the life of John Nash is available to all. It is a book that weighs down on one, as it describes a community of mathematicians at Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), brilliant and obsessed but troubled by neurosis and insanity.

There was Norbert Weiner, the father of cybernetics and an avuncular presence in Nash's life. He fluctuated between manic excitability and depression, and frequently contemplated suicide. There was the brilliant Norman Levinson, who provided Nash with some of the kindness he craved but was too awkward to ask for. Levinson himself suffered from hypochondria and acute depression, and also the pain of watching his daughter slide into mental illness. The agony was made worse by the fact that he was a communist sympathiser and a target of Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunt.

The book does justice to the life of Nash, his obsession with intellectual excellence to the exclusion of everything else and the tragedy of his long confinements in mental homes. But the true heroes in this biography are the women: Virginia, Nash's mother; Eleanor, his brief lover who bore him a son; and above all, Alicia, his wife and mother of his other child.

Alicia was from El Salvador and as a student at MIT was known for her beauty and intelligence. She fell in love with Nash and married him. But within years his insanity and rudeness to everybody, including Alicia, became unmanageable. She had no option but to divorce him. She did so, but could not abandon him. She took him back into her house as a live-in guest. That is where Nash still stays.

It is clear from Nasar's account that Alicia's immense strength and compassion have played a role in Nash's survival. In the end, when we encounter Nash joking at an informal lecture that he was pleased about the Nobel Prize because that would improve his credit rating and enable him to get the credit card he never had, it becomes apparent that this book -- dedicated to Alicia -- is also, in a way, a tribute to her.

The author is C. Marks professor of economics, Cornell University.

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