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| Spotlight Reviews 1.a mathematical mind, November 20, 2001 Reviewer: shelley isom (El Cerrito, CA United States) I generally hate biographies. They are usually heavily loaded with details of no significance while lacking in a larger meaning, plus most of their subjects wind up dead, thus defeating the purpose of biography (to make living seem significant) and I wind up depressed by the whole exercise -- life always seems so pointless after reading a biography. I make two exceptions to this: Boswell's Life of Johnson and this biography (obviously, I don't seek this kind of literary genre so I realize I may have overlooked a few good ones). This book is less a biography in the usual sense than an exploration of a human being with a special talent/obsession -- mathematics. Reading this book made me realize that mathematics is really a branch of art and depends on living on the edge (close to insanity) so as to fish insight from the chaos just on the other side of rationality. Creativity without danger is worthless. John Forbes Nash was clearly not a "people" person although there is something appealing about him despite his arrogance, ambition and vanity -- he is a truth teller, and while we all pretend to admire truth tellers, we always prefer those who don't go near that cold inhospitable country. That he went mad seemed almost inevitable given the extent of his ambition and hubris -- he wanted to fish out the biggest of mathematical fish and when he realized that his incapacity for study and overestimation of his own talent and inspiration meant that his fish had already been landed by other mathematicians and/or found to be illusory, he chose the lesser of two evils -- insanity. Anything but to become just another mediocrity. He plunged into numerology (became a kind of numerical visionary) leaving strange little numerological messages all over Fine Hall which he haunted like a prescient ghost. In his public life, he became an actor in his own paranoid delusion, traveling here and there, trying to obtain citizenship in one country while forfeiting it in another, an ad hoc peace broker. Like most paranoiacs, his delusions were solipsistic yet formulaic, following his political inclinations. At Princeton, people who came across these little bursts of enigmatic enlightenment left on the walls and blackboards felt moved to write them down. He lived like this for some 30 years, and then for some reason known only to himself (he explains it as having realized that he could rein in his paranoiac ideation by simply recognizing when he was beginning to go down that road and turning his thoughts elsewhere). This realization, by the way, puts him way up there in my estimation. He learned to control his own mind, to make his return to sanity a triumph rather than a sad defeat. He recognized where the danger lay and learned to avoid it when he wanted to. When he returned to the flatland of reason, he never turned against his mad self. In fact, he said that his mathematical inspiration came from the same place as his so-called delusional thinking. (Here's an idea: what if paranoid delusions are not really insane; they only seem so because each person with these ideas couches them in a personal way, dresses them eccentrically according to whim, and we are fooled by how silly they look rather than by how consistent they are from one so-called paranoid individual to the next -- maybe there is something out there taking over our minds. Maybe that's why our minds are so limited and getting more so all the time. We haven't always been this stupid). His winning the Nobel Prize at this late stage was also a proof of his great personal power. The Nobel Prize committee had deep reservations about the public relations danger of giving a prize to a man who had been publicly insane for 30 years. He won it also not for mathematics but in economics (a hotly debated topic -- many considered economics as a discipline unworthy of a Nobel Prize). The portion of the book about the Nobel Prize is just great. We get a good look at how this system works, how it keeps its equilibrium in the world of high thought and keeps its credibility by not making too many odd/wrong choices. I also liked the speech he gave when accepting it. He had put a great deal of single minded intentionality into winning a great prize and that he won the Nobel seems less a credit to the committee than to this man's indomitable will. At the same time, he had lived past the sheer need for fame and he received it merely as a token to his young self (for his young self's work in games theory) and was appreciative that it allowed him to obtain a credit card. I like his aside during his Nobel speech when he parenthetically gave an acknowledgment to his insane self -- his alter ego. Other oddly mathematical touches in his life: two sons named John. One was illegitimate by a woman who clung to the hope that Nash would marry her at some point or at least support her and her offspring. He never did. He married a beauty (a physicist) instead -- Alicia -- and produced another son named John. This John has been diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. He had his father's footsteps to follow. In his meetings with this John, Nash sees himself at that age and tells John not to indulge in insanity. Nash is a man who lived according to his own lights. His was not a social life, yet it is instructive and it gives hope to people who refuse to conform to the social model. This great biography makes this clear. 2.The Book That Inspired The Movie, December 21, 2001 Reviewer: Francis J. Mcinerney (Commonwealth) This book draws very sharp divisions between movies that are about a life, based on a life, or in this case, inspired by a life. Whether you have scene the movie or even the trailer, once you read this book it become immediately apparent Dr. Nash's life would not fit into any single film. To a degree this is simply an instance of practicality, for the work this man and his peers did, is intelligible to a small handful of people. Even while reading the book, unless your math skills are somewhat extraordinary, the lexicon of pure math will be completely new, and the concepts these men and women developed are fascinating, however they are almost unimaginably complex. To those who have read material that may have touched on Game Theory, The Prisoner's Dilemma, and The Mobius Band, the book will allow for moments when the inquisitive can participate. In most cases the concepts are mind bending, and in some cases they could not even be verbalized by some of the brilliant minds that Dr. Nash worked amongst. Ms. Sylvia Nasar does an excellent job of explaining why Dr. Nash was so different from his peers, and how he approached complex issues in fundamentally different manners than others. The remarkable story is of this brilliant man who was considered one of the greatest thinkers of his time who fell gradually, though fairly quickly, into a mental state that caused his family to commit him more than once. The decades he spent living under the most bizarre and destructive delusions, his moments of clarity, and then his highly unusual recovery makes for an incredible tale. This is one of those stories that had it been written as fiction, it would not have been taken seriously. The other parts of the book were very revealing as they pertained to Dr. Nash and his peers at Princeton, MIT, and elsewhere. The fields they work in are intensely competitive, however when he began his decline, and then continued to have false starts at normality, for the most part he was not abandoned. The author touches on why his peers may have felt the need to help a man who routinely demonstrated the most hurtful personal behavior to anyone he came in contact with. There were exceptions, but they are very few in number, and not for the people you might suppose. All of these great minds share at least one commonality, and that is their ability to think at extremely high levels that few can even imagine. Many of these people seem to constantly fear the loss of whatever unique gifts they have. They also tend to be people that have been marginalized until they find their place in the academic world, for what they think of, and the eccentricities they often have, single them out for ridicule not praise. A very readable biography, a profession that is understood by few. Customer Reviews 1.The next John Nash, 15 Oct 2005 Reviewer: Anon (Europe) This is information that I believe ought to be know: I am an African American, who received a doctorate in mathematics in 1974. For many years, I have been stalked and black-balled by the CIA, similarly to Prof. Nash in the film. For instance, there are 271 forum visitors online now as I compose this. What really bothers me is that the topic of my Master's thesis was mentioned in the dialogue of the movie drama, without giving me a credit and without indication that the problem had been solved by someone. The movie screenwriter had no right to drag me into the story by referring to my Master's thesis, which was never published. The only good thing I can say is that I became acquainted with some of the work of Prof. Nash, after viewing the film, and discovered.it to be quite interesting. 2.The Hubris of Genius, 9 Jul 2004 Reviewer: C.B.Liddell (Tokyo, Japan) This biography of the Nobel Prize winner and schizophrenic mathematical genius John Forbes Nash surprisingly brings to mind the main character in Dostoyevsky's great novel, "Crime and Punishment." Like the intense, reclusive student, Raskolnikov, Nash in this biography comes across as an extremely anti-social and arrogant young man, convinced that his genius gives him certain rights and freedoms beyond the petty restrictions, rules, and manners that govern normal human conduct. But whereas Dostoyevsky's character commits a murder, Nash's main offense is merely to be an arrogant and boorish lout, forever trying to show off to his fellow students at Princeton. When he is later struck down by mental illness after achieving so much so young, we can't help feeling there is an element of hubris involved. Nash also fits into the popular paradigm of the lop-sided genius, the person of incredible talents who can't deal with the simpler aspects of daily life. As in the case of the notoriously absent-minded Albert Einstein -- whom Nash meets in the book -- or the equally eccentric Isaac Newton, we somehow feel reassured that these supreme geniuses have their weaknesses. For all these reasons, this is a story that resonates on a mythic and psychological level. We keep rooting for Nash, but also secretly look forward to him tripping up. This reflects the ambivalent attitude to the sciences that most people have -- we are both intrigued by new discoveries but afraid of their ramifications. Around the age of 30, Nash's quest to find greater meaning in the Universe sparked off his insanity as he started to discern complex codes implanted by extra-terrestrials in the random occurrence of certain letters of the alphabet in daily life. But, although this is essentially a tragedy of a brilliant mind struck down by schizophrenia, it is nevertheless one with a happy ending. After paying his dues for his genius and arrogance, Nash gradually recovers and receives his apotheosis in the 1994 Nobel Prize for economics. Movies and books are radically different media, so don't expect this to read like the recent Oscar-winning movie that it inspired. The expansiveness of the written word allows for much more detail to emerge as well as countless digressions and forays into the worlds of science and mathematics that the movie had no space for. So, if you saw the movie and loved it, this biography still has plenty to offer. |
| A former economics correspondent for The New York Times, Sylvia Nasar is the Knight Professor of Journalism at Columbia University. She lives in Tarrytown, New York. ... .. << 查看详细 |
| prologue part one：a beautiful mind 1 bluefield(1928—45) 2 carnegie institute of technology(june 1945一june 1948) 3 the center ofthe universe(princeton,fall 1948) 4 school of genius (princcton,fall 1948) 5 genius(princeton,1948—49) 6 games fprinceton,spring 1949) 7 john von neumann(princeton．1948-49) 8 the theory of games 9 the bargaining problem (princeton,spring 1 949) 10 nash’s rival idea(princeton．1949-50) 11 lloyd fprinccton,1950) 12 the wlar of wits(rand,summer 1950) 13 game theory at rand 14 the draft(princeton,1950-51) 15 a beautiful theorem(princeton,1950-51) 16 mit 17 bad boys 18 experiments(rand,summer 1952) . 19 reds(spring 1953) 20 geometry part two：separate lives 21 singularity 22 a special friendship(santa monica,summer 1952) 23 eleanor 24 jack 25 the arrest(rand,summer，1954） 26 alicia 27 the courtship 28 seattle(summer 1956) 29 death and marriage fl 956-57) part three：a slow fire burning 30 olden lane and washington square(1 956-57) 31 the bomb factory 32 secrets(summer 1958) 33 schemes ffali 1958) 34 the emperor of antarctica 35 in the eye ofthe storm(spring 1959) 36 day breaks in bowditch hall (mclean hospital april-may 1959) 37 mad hatter's tea(may-june 1959) part four：the lost years 38 citoyen du monde fpansandgeneva,1959-60) 39 absolutezero(princeton．1960) 40 tower of silence(trenton state hospital 1961) 41 an interlude of enforced rationality (july 1961-april 1963) 42 the“blowing up”problem (princeton and carrier clinic,1963—65) 43 solitude(boston,1965-67) 44 a man all alone in a strange world(roanoke,1967--70) 45 phantom of fine hall(princeton,1970s) 46 a quiet life (princeton,1970—90) part five：the most worthy 47 remission 48 the prize 49 the greatest auction ever (washington,d．c,ecember 1994) 50 reawakening (princeton,1995-97) epilogue notes select bibliography acknowledgments index |
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