A Brilliant Madness

The story of John Nash

The 2001 movie, A Beautiful Mind, was not a documentary and took artful liberties to merit Oscars (and sell over $300 million in tickets). This is a 2002 PBS documentary that mostly tells a better story (free, just because). The Nashes were not allowed to influence the movie narrative (which featured John having visual hallucinations he never had).

The PBS narrative is based on the remembrances of those involved, including John and Alicia Nash, his sister, son, collogues, plus some “just the facts, Ma’am” documenting.

The video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gb98zREUwE

An AI Overview

A Brilliant Madness. The story of John Nash (2002)

John Nash, a brilliant but eccentric mathematician, struggled with mental illness throughout his career. Initially, his work in game theory revolutionized economics, leading to the concept of the Nash equilibrium. Despite his brilliance, Nash’s delusional behavior, including paranoid schizophrenia, led to multiple hospitalizations and a strained personal life. His recovery was gradual, aided by his wife Alicia’s support. In 1994, at age 66, Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, recognizing his groundbreaking contributions. His story highlights the complexities of mental illness and the resilience of the human spirit.

John Nash’s Early Life and Academic Beginnings

• Narrator discusses the eccentricity of mathematicians and John Nash’s promising career that was shattered.
• Felix Browder describes Nash as someone who was promising beyond any reasonable limit.
• Silvia Nasar highlights the idea of someone mentally ill and impoverished being considered for a Nobel Prize.
• John Nash talks about his delusional thoughts, feeling like the most important person in the world.
• Narrator recounts the historical context of the Soviet Union joining the United States as a nuclear power and the importance of mathematicians.

John Nash’s Unconventional Approach to Mathematics

• Nash is described as being arrogant and eccentric, rarely attending class to maintain his originality.
• Nash’s reputation for being both brilliant and odd is established, with anecdotes of his eccentric behavior.
• Nash’s senior year in high school is recounted, including his winning a Westinghouse scholarship and graduating with a master’s degree in math.
• Nash’s invention of the game “Nash” and his work in game theory are highlighted, marking his reputation at Princeton.

Nash’s Groundbreaking Work and Personal Challenges

• Nash’s work on the Nash equilibrium and its impact on economics is discussed.
• Nash’s relationship with Eleanor Steer and the challenges of supporting their child are recounted.
• Nash’s first serious relationship with Alicia Nash and their marriage in 1957 are described.
• Nash’s groundbreaking proofs in various fields of mathematics are highlighted, including his work on the Riemann hypothesis.

Nash’s Psychotic Break and Hospitalization

• Nash’s psychotic break and the onset of his delusional behavior are described, including his eccentric behavior at a costume party.
• Nash’s hospitalization at McLean Hospital and his diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia are recounted.
• Nash’s treatment at McLean, including psychoanalysis and the use of Thorazine, is discussed.
• Nash’s release from McLean and his subsequent resignation from MIT are described.

Nash’s European Wanderings and Return to the United States

• Nash’s travels in Europe, including his attempts to give up his American citizenship, are recounted.
• Nash’s return to the United States and his hospitalization at Trenton State Hospital are described.
• Nash’s treatment at Trenton, including insulin coma therapy, is discussed.
• Nash’s discharge from Trenton and his return to Princeton are recounted.

Nash’s Recovery and Professional Achievements

• Nash’s recovery and his return to mathematics are described, including his work on fluid dynamics.
• Nash’s relationship with his son John Steer and his reconnection with his family are recounted.
• Nash’s work as the “Phantom” on campus and the impact of his work on game theory are discussed.
• Nash’s eventual recognition with the Nobel Prize in economics is highlighted.

Nash’s Nobel Prize and Final Years

• Nash’s Nobel Prize in economics is announced, and the impact of his work on modern economics is discussed.
• Nash’s return to Princeton and his continued work in mathematics are described.
• Nash’s remarriage to Alicia Nash and his reconnection with his son John Steer are recounted.
• Nash’s final years and his reflections on his life and work are discussed.

Transcript

[AI with human editing.]

Narrator 0:29
Mathematicians have the propensity to be eccentric more than most people, but there was no hint that it would shade over into fully delusional psychotic behavior. We were all aware that he had a great career that was shattered in a few minutes.

Felix Browder 0:47
There was a very disastrous fall, someone who was promising beyond any reasonable limit.

Zipporah Levinson 0:55
He was so incredibly himself, so special, so unusual. He was just an oddity. And there was something sweet about it.

Silvia Nasar 1:06
The idea that someone who had been mentally ill and impoverished and really on the fringes of society for decades was being considered for a Nobel Prize. I thought that was amazing.

John Nash 1:24
Madness can be an escape. Things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better. In madness. I thought I was the most important person of the world, and people like the Pope would be just like enemies who would try to put me down somewhere.

Narrator 2:21
In September 1949 the world learned that the Soviet Union had joined the United States as a nuclear power. The shocking news intensified fears in the US and put a premium on mathematicians. Mathematicians had helped win World War Two. Now there was hope they could protect America’s strategic edge. Princeton University boasted the most elite math department in the world. Each of its graduate students was hand picked. That year one stood out, a 20 year old from West Virginia named John Forbes Nash.

Silvia Nasar 3:08
These young mathematicians were all pretty cocky, but he towered over them in arrogance and confidence and also in eccentricity.

Mel Hausner 3:23
John Nash was always an entity unto himself. When John walked into the room, you knew that John walked into the room. I think he thought of himself as superior, intellectually, mathematically superior. We thought highly of ourselves and each other, but with John, it was double. John just was just very clearly above it.

Narrator 3:56
Nash rarely attended class, claiming it would blunt his originality. He was obsessed with making a name for himself, and was always on the hunt for problems that had defeated other mathematicians.

John Nash 4:09
There is something that in my approach to mathematics, I have tended to think that the thing to do is to get away from what other people are doing and not not to follow directly in any anyone’s recent work.

Felix Browder 4:26
He didn’t study anything. He didn’t assimilate other people’s work. What he did was to try to find his own way of solving very difficult problems, and he thought he had the talent to fulfill these ambitions of being the world’s greatest mathematician.

Narrator 4:42
Nash soon acquired a reputation for being both brilliant and odd. In the quadrangle he rode a bicycle in figure eights over and over, and paced the hallways, obsessively whistling Bach’s. Little Fugue.

Paul Samuelson 5:03
Fine Hall is where the mathematicians met. I went there, and I looked around. I knew a number of the people, but I didn’t know them all. And I thought, this is the strangest group of people in the world. Not only was Nash not an exception to that, but I think he was quite far off the chart.

Felix Browder 5:23
He obviously irritated some people by what I think they regarded as extremely eccentric behavior. There’s certainly not a conformance to anyone’s standard.

Narrator 5:42
Even as a boy growing up in Bluefield, West Virginia, deep in the Appalachian Mountains, John Nash stood out.

John Nash 5:50
I was in grade school. I would be doing arithmetic. I found myself working with larger numbers than other students would be using. I would have several digits, and they would have maybe two or three digits.

Marrna Nash Legg 6:09
One time, one of the teachers said he couldn’t do the math. It’s like fourth grade. And my mother laughed, because it was obviously the point was he was doing it differently. I think my parents always knew that John was bright.

Narrator 6:26
His father, John, senior, was an electrical engineer. His mother, Virginia, a former teacher, tutored John at home and had him skip a grade in school.

John Nash 6:39
One time, someone suggested that I was a prodigy, another time they were suggested that I should be called bug brains because I had ideas that were sort of buggy or not perfectly sound.

Donald Reynolds 6:57
He took his share of abuse from certain groups, the brain working a little bit faster than anybody’s else is so everybody else felt like they had to ridicule it a little bit.

Narrator 7:11
His senior year in high school, John won a Westinghouse scholarship, one of only 10 awarded nationally. Three years later, he graduated from Carnegie Institute of Technology with a master’s degree in math. His advisor wrote him a one sentence recommendation. “This man is a genius.”

Silvia Nasar 7:40
The first thing that he did at Princeton, which wowed everyone and made his reputation, was he invented this game, which was known around the common room as Nash.

Narrator 7:56
Nash’s deceptively simple game of strategy swept the math department. Before long, he applied his interest in games to a new field of mathematics called game theory. Game theory attempted to explain the dynamics of human conflict by analyzing strategies used in games.

Silvia Nasar 8:17
Nash was interested in everything in mathematics, but what he was really interested in were the big problems. At that moment in time, Game theory was the sexy, glamorous field. If you wanted to make a splash, it was a good place to be.

Narrator 8:43
Just a year after arriving at Princeton, he began work on an idea that challenged the conventional thinking in game theory.

Mel Hausner 8:52
Classical game theory was basically two people playing against each other, two person game in which if one person wins, the other person loses. Suppose you have many players. Game theory got into a phase that people couldn’t really deal with it. They didn’t understate the problem.

Harold Kuhn 9:10
If we could make a theoretical model that would answer questions of, why do you bluff and poker? Why would you bet when you have a low hand? Why would you fail to bet if you have a high hand, if we could analyze things like that, then we could handle real life problems in economics, in business, in politics. He had that vision.

Narrator 9:38
Nash’s Insight was another deceptively simple one. He proved that in every game, there is a best strategy for each player, given the strategies chosen by the other players. He called it the equilibrium point. In the spring of 1950 Nash presented his. Is elegant proof he was only 21 years later, what became known as the Nash equilibrium would revolutionize economics, but when it was first completed, nobody recognized its potential, not even Nash.

Narrator 10:33
After receiving his PhD, Nash moved to Boston and joined the faculty of MIT students called him the kid professor, but he considered himself head and shoulders above his colleagues.

Unknown Speaker 10:48
Basically, John was a out and out an uninhibited and shameless elitist. He was only interested in people who could operate more or less on the same mental level that he was at.

Zipporah Levinson 11:01
He was very brash, very boastful, very selfish, very egocentric. His colleagues did not like him especially, but they tolerated him because his mathematics are so brilliant.

Donald Newman 11:22
I was thinking about a problem, trying to get somewhere with it, and I couldn’t, and I couldn’t and I couldn’t, and I went to sleep one night, and I dreamt. I did not dream directly of a solution to that problem. Rather, I dreamt that I met mash, and I asked him the problem, and he told me the answer. When I did finally write the paper. I gave him credit. It was not my solution. I could not have done it myself.

Herta Newman 12:13
He was part of this group of friends that Donald, my husband, had. This was a crew who were extremely competitive, and Nash was at the top of the heap. He was the best.

Narrator 12:33
The following year, Nash began his first serious relationship, Eleanor steer was a shy, compassionate nurse, five years his senior, two months after they started dating, Eleanor discovered she was pregnant. She gave birth to a baby boy, and named him John Nash refused to pay for the delivery, wouldn’t even add his name to the birth certificate. Unable to support her son on her own, Eleanor was forced to place him in foster care for much of his childhood.

Narrator 13:13
She was pretty hurt. She was very hurt. I think she was quite fond of my father and things didn’t happen the way she expected him to.

Narrator 13:49
The couple drifted apart. Nash kept the affair a secret. His parents and colleagues didn’t even know he had a son. He not long after breaking up with Eleanor Nash, met Alicia lardae, a 21 year old from El Salvador and one of his students, a physics major, she was one of only 16 women in a class of 800 at MIT.

Silvia Nasar 14:04
She was an extremely attractive girl and not American. And I somehow think that that was significant, that she was not your ordinary college girl, that she had also come from a very different place.

Alicia Nash 14:21
At the time, he was a little bit like the fair haired boy of the math department. He was, I think, considered very young for his position. And he was very nice looking. You know,

Silvia Nasar 14:38
When she was younger, she wanted to be another Madame Curie. John’s ambition was one of the things that attracted Alicia to him. She had that desire, and she transferred it to him.

Narrator 15:02
In February 1957 Alicia and John Nash were married in a small private ceremony in Washington, DC.

Marrna Nash Legg 15:12
John was marrying somebody who was intelligent, that he cared for and she cared she obviously cared for him. Everything was great.

Narrator 15:32
Since arriving at MIT Nash had solved a series of imposing problems in mathematics ranging from algebraic geometry to partial differential equations. Unlike his work in game theory, these groundbreaking proofs dazzled the mathematical world.

Harold Kuhn 15:51
We would all be climbing the mountain, the mountain being mathematical perfection. He had a different approach. We came up this way, and he came this way.

Narrator 16:10
In July 1958 Fortune magazine featured him as one of the brightest stars in mathematics. He had just turned 30.

Silvia Nasar 16:20
for a mathematician turning 30, like for a ballet dancer or an athlete, age is your enemy.

Narrator 16:32
By his own standards, Nash had fallen short. For a decade he had pursued the Fields Medal mathematics, highest honor that year. He failed to win it again.

Paul Samuelson 16:47
He was an intensely ambitious person. He was extremely competitive, and he was very bitter that he didn’t get it.

John Nash 16:57
At the time, I had some recognition. I was making some progress professionally, but it wasn’t really at the top. I didn’t have top level recognition.

Narrator 17:14
He threw himself into solving the Riemann hypothesis, the holy grail of mathematics. The work was mentally and physically exhausting and ultimately proved futile. He began to worry that his best years were behind him. At the same time, he learned that Alicia was pregnant.

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Louis Sass 17:39
A psychotic break is usually precipitated by some stressful experiences. Often these stressful experiences involve a demand that the person who becomes psychotic take on greater responsibility.

Narrator 17:57
Below his brash and confident surface, John Nash now hid another side of himself, one filled with anxiety, self doubt, even fear. It would mark the beginning of a strange and tragic metamorphosis.

Narrator 18:25
On New Year’s Eve, 1958 the Nashes attended a costume party at the home of a colleague. John went dressed as a baby. He wore a diaper and spent much of the night curled up in Alicia’s lap. Even to those used to his eccentricities, it was a disturbing scene. A few weeks later, Nash rushed into the common room at MIT and claimed that powers from outer space were sending him coded messages in the New York Times in another incident soon followed. He interrupted a lecture to announce that he was on the cover of Life magazine disguised as Pope John the 23rd he knew this, he said because 23 was his favorite prime number then he began noticing a curious pattern on the MIT campus, men wearing red ties, and was sure they were members of a secret communist organization. When the University of Chicago offered him a prestigious position. Nash turned it down. He was already scheduled, he said, to become emperor of Antarctica.

Narrator 19:56
John talked about the people from outer space. Who were destroying his career, and the international organizations that were attacking him, somebody you known for a long time. To hear this kind of news is very unsettling.

Alicia Nash 20:18
Truly, his personality seemed to change in a period of a week or so. It was very fast.

Harold Kuhn 20:24
I mean, you’re seeing a mind disintegrate in front of you. I felt shocked.

Narrator 20:34
The math department chairman thought Nash was having a nervous breakdown, and relieved him of his teaching duties in February. Still, Nash continued to unravel. One night, he painted black spots all over the bedroom wall.

Silvia Nasar 20:51
Alicia tried to handle it herself, but at a certain point it overwhelmed her, and when she turned to a psychiatrist, she was ultimately advised that he should be hospitalized.

Silvia Nasar 21:14
Here is this genius, and you were going to clap him into a hospital where God knows what might happen. I think it was very tough.

John Nash 21:25
I didn’t feel that I belonged locked up. I never went voluntarily.

Narrator 21:41
Nash was taken to McLean Hospital, a private psychiatric facility outside Boston known for treating the wealthy and famous. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and given an injection of Thorazine to calm him down. His treatment consisted of psychoanalysis. The staff called him professor.

Erhan Cinlar 22:04
In those days, many doctors thought schizophrenia was related to problems in childhood, problems in mothering. They didn’t know it was a real brain disease, and that people are born with a vulnerability to that brain disorder.

Peter Weiden 22:18
Conventionally, we define it as a severe mental illness characterized by hallucinations, delusions, or peculiar forms of thinking. For example, a schizophrenic may feel that when he looks at you, he may believe that it’s not himself who’s looking at his own eyes, some somehow someone else is actually having his experiences.

John Nash 22:40
Yes, a delusional state of mind is like living a dream. When I knew where I was, I was there on observation, but I was able to think that I was like a victim of a conspiracy.

Peter Weiden 23:08
The delusions have often a cosmic quality, a feeling of ominousness. Everything that happens around you takes on a tremendous significance you.

John Nash 23:25
In madness I saw myself as some sort of a messenger having a special function, like the Muslim concept with Muhammad, the Messenger of Allah.

Silvia Nasar 23:43
Someone who visited him in the hospital asked him, How could you mathematician, someone who’s committed to rationality, how could you believe that aliens from outer space were communicating with you? Nash’s response was, these ideas came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did so I believed them.

Narrator 24:19
Virginia visited John at McLean, but could hardly bear to see her son in such a state.

Marrna Nash Legg 24:24
It broke her I guess, it’s devastating. You can imagine that every day she would wake up and every she would go to bed, and she would have this on her.

Narrator 24:38
Alicia urged his colleagues to visit, hoping their support would help John get back on his feet.

Herta Newman 24:46
All the mathematicians were very upset, because this was a great genius that was lost.

Donald Newman 24:55
They said, Newman, they are not going to let me out. I. Until I’m normal, but that’ll never be I never was.

John Nash 25:05
I began to realize I would not be getting out of the hospital unless I conformed and behaved normally. So I in part I would do that is if I would be sweeping the delusions under a rug and they were able to come out later on, it could be triggered, and I would move very quickly to accepting it again.

Narrator 25:35
Nash retained a lawyer who secured his release after 50 days of hospitalization. Within weeks, he resigned from MIT, withdrew all the money from his pension fund and announced he was leaving for Europe. Alicia, who had given birth while John was in McLean, felt she had no choice but to go with him. They left behind their newborn son with Alicia’s mother.

Narrator 26:09
In July 1959 the Nashes arrived in Paris to find the city in turmoil. The streets reverberated with strikes, explosions and mass demonstrations against the nuclear arms race. A week later, Nash suddenly took off on his own. He went to Luxembourg and announced he wanted to give up his American citizenship. He was turned away in way

John Nash 26:49
I got to Geneva and I thought of a way of being a refugee. They had a slogan, City of Refuge. I envisioned a hidden world where the communists and the anti communists were really the same. They were sort of schemers. I had the idea that some of the people like Eisenhower and the Pope and the powers that be might be unsympathetic to me, these thoughts on the surface are not rational, but there could be a situation where there were things were not what they might seem.

Peter Weiden 27:38
If to be mad is to be in error. There’s a kind of contradiction there isn’t there between what it is to be mad in the eyes of the world and what it is to have these experiences in which you’re having a sense of revelation and you’re noticing features of the world that other people seem to be too stupid or too blind to recognize.

Felix Browder 28:02
My time when he was trying to give up his citizenship, he was being followed around by the naval attache, who had was commissioned to get his passport back give it to Alicia. And so he chased him around Europe.

Alicia Nash 28:18
I went to the American Embassy in Paris, and I asked for help. I said, I don’t know what to do, you know, but I don’t want him to get into trouble.

Narrator 28:29
Nash wandered Europe for nine months before embassy officials arranged to have him deported. French police seized him and took him to the airport. Nash later claimed that he was sent back on a ship in chains, like a slave.

Narrator 28:54
The Nashes moved to Princeton to support her family. Alicia took a job with a research division of RCA. She hoped that with the help of the math community, they could start over again.

Narrator 29:08
When John moved back to Princeton, we offered him work with no real heavy responsibility, just to get him back into the society and those efforts founded when he refused to sign W4 forms. He just was he was paranoid schizophrenic. He wouldn’t sign a document for the government because he still thought there was a conspiracy there, out there against him. Nash was still in the grips of his illness. He became obsessed with unrest in the Middle East and made countless phone calls to friends and family using fictitious names.

Marrna Nash Legg 29:48
He would call me, would you accept a collect call from some strange name? And I didn’t, because I didn’t want to validate that he was this other person.

Narrator 30:00
One day, he showed up on campus covered with scratches and visibly terrified. Johan von NASA has been a bad boy. He said they’re going to come and get me now,

Narrator 30:18
Less than two years after his release from McLean, Nash was hospitalized again. Alicia Virginia and his sister Martha committed him to Trenton State Hospital, the former New Jersey lunatic asylum.

Marrna Nash Legg 30:34
At this point, we didn’t know whether this is going to be a very long, very expensive process, and we had been advised that Trenton was a good hospital.

Silvia Nasar 30:44
McLean Hospital had been kind of a country club. Trenton was a crowded, open ward. When he arrived at Trenton, state national was assigned a number and was mocked and told to sweep up, and it was a terrible thing.

Narrator 31:06
When his colleagues heard where Nash was, many were outraged. Who’s going to figure out what is wrong with the genius there? Asked one, it is in the national interest, warned another, that everything possible be done to protect Nash’s exceptional mind.

Narrator 31:28
Trenton state was known for its aggressive treatments, including insulin coma therapy, which by 1961 had been phased out in all but a few hospitals.

Donald Newman 31:40
Insulin coma was developed under the mistaken notion that schizophrenia was caused by a metabolic problem. By the way the body regulates glucose. Insulin coma was one of the more popular and unfortunately one of the more notorious treatments in its day in.

John Nash 32:07
I don’t remember all the details, the sort of thing that like if you go under anesthesia, you don’t, you remember only the prices up to the anesthesia.

Narrator 32:23
A nurse would wake patients early in the morning and give them an injection of insulin, their blood sugar would drop, and soon they would be comatose. Some patients would suffer spontaneous seizures,

Donald Newman 32:38
Insulin coma deliberately puts the body into total shock. This was done under supervised circumstances, because if you do that too aggressively, you can die.

John Nash 32:58
I remember some of the surrounding events, there would be a group of people that would be getting it, and then afterwards, they would go out on the ground and pass the time and drink sugar water. I got to thinking of the cruelty to animals. I became a vegetarian at the time that I was in the Trenton hospital. I was sort of thought that one could protest against this sort of treatment.

Narrator 33:38
Nash endured insulin treatments five days a week. For six weeks, his symptoms diminished, and after six months of confinement, he was finally discharged. No one knew what the long term effects of his treatment might be.

Herta Newman 33:58
He came to visit us, and it was after this awful treatment, and he looked like he had been battered and through some devastating something. And spoke of it a little bit himself. And it was, you know, it was kind of heartbreaking.

Donald Reynolds 34:17
He said these treatments that he had gone through had wiped out his early memory. So I think what he was doing, he was visiting me and different people to see if he could get his memory back.

Narrator 34:45
In 1961 Nash was 33 and unemployed, former Princeton colleagues secured him a research position, and he managed to publish a paper on fluid dynamics, his first piece of work in four years. 90s, he seemed to be better, but inside Nash felt a sense of loss. Rational thought, he wrote, imposes a limit on a person’s relation to the cosmos. He later called his remission periods, interludes of enforced rationality.

John Nash 35:21
To some extent, sanity is a form of conformity. People are always selling the idea that people who have mental illness are suffering. But it’s really not so simple. I think mental illness or madness can be an escape also.

Narrator 35:45
The following summer, he left for Europe alone, once again, obsessed with asylum. Before long, friends and family began receiving letters and postcards.

John Stier 36:18
It wasn’t the type of letter you would expect to receive from a father, how you doing or what you been up to. It was unbelievable how these things were supposed to mean something.

Marrna Nash Legg 36:33
They were frightening in a way, the letters and they made use of all the things that had been in his life. Mathematics was a kind of numerology and politics mixed with paranoia,

Narrator 37:01
Distraught after three years of turmoil, Alicia filed for divorce in December 1962 her complaint charged that Nash resented her for committing him and had deserted her without support.

Narrator 37:22
Mathematicians from MIT and Princeton found Nash an academic position in Boston. They got him an apartment and arranged for him to meet weekly with a psychiatrist who prescribed anti psychotic medication. Gradually, he seemed to improve. He was pretty sane. Recalled a colleague, he was a much nicer person. The old ego stuff was gone. He began seeing Eleanor and their son John again.

John Stier 38:02
We had gotten into a pattern of going out every Saturday. We started to grow more fond of him as he was around more, and then he went as quickly as he came. So

Narrator 38:18
Less than a year after moving to Boston, Nash stopped taking his medication, and his symptoms resurfaced.

Donald Newman 38:26
These medicines interfere with vitality, with drive, with thinking. So the price that many patients had to pay for being on these medicines was that they felt lifeless, like it takes away their soul.

Marrna Nash Legg 38:41
Well, he was afraid of anything would alter the quality of his mind. And as anyone doesn’t want to be forced to do something they don’t want to do or they don’t choose to do. And John had always been very independent about what he chose to do.

Narrator 39:04
His delusions were now joined by a chorus of voices in his head.

Louis Sass 39:14
The kinds of hallucinations that are most common in schizophrenia are auditory hallucinations of voices of a certain kind. One kind would be two or more voices, which are talking about the ongoing behavior of the patient. So if I were schizophrenic, I might hear, you know, John and Mary saying, Okay, so, so why is Louis doing that? Now and then Mary would say to John, oh, he’s just a jerk. He always does that kind of thing. They go back and forth, but it’s sort of a commentary, often critical on my ongoing behavior.

John Nash 39:43
You’re really talking to yourself. It’s what the voices are.

Marrna Nash Legg 40:10
He said he understood that there was something that went on between people that was alien to him. He was sort of enclosed in a bubble that he felt lonely.

Narrator 40:38
In 1970 Alicia Nash had a change of heart. She felt John’s repeated hospitalizations had been a mistake. Alicia decided to let him move back in with her and promised never to commit him again.

Alicia Nash 40:53
I didn’t think he should just be hospitalized in an institution and left there, and I just felt it was best for him to be on the outside.

Zipporah Levinson 41:03
She took him back, not as her husband, but as somebody who needed help and nobody else would have him, giving him shelter and meals and protection made a tremendous difference in his well being.

Silvia Nasar 41:19
If she hadn’t taken him in, he would have wound up on the streets. I think that Alicia saved his life.

Narrator 41:32
Princeton students began noticing a strange sight on campus, entire blackboards filled with minutely written formulas and secret codes, rumors spread. It was the work of a mysterious figure who wore red sneakers and kept to himself. They called him the phantom.

Silvia Nasar 41:43
There were all kinds of myths about him. The students would tell each other that he had gone mad because of a too difficult problem he tried to crack or after a rival beat him to the punch. And students were aware that the powers that be were protecting him.

Erhan Cinlar 42:14
From time to time, you would see in your office, you know, under the door, sort of huge number of sheets that’s been worked out the night before, computing the probabilities of certain coincidences to. Of very detailed computations he was into proving the existence of God.

John Nash 42:39
I felt that I might get a divine revelation by seeing a certain number, a great coincidence could be interpreted as something a message from heaven.

Felix Browder 42:47
I did see him several times. He didn’t recognize me. I didn’t press the matter. I didn’t have the sense I could have any contact with so I didn’t try.

Narrator 43:15
Year after year for more than a decade, the Phantom roamed the Princeton canvas, unaware that the work he had done as a student had finally sparked a revolution, beginning in the 1960s economists began to successfully apply game theory to real life situations, mergers, strikes, collective bargaining. These situations of conflict and cooperation are part of the backbone of practical economics.

Narrator 43:54
Auctions, farm subsidies, monetary policy, international trade, all were now seen as strategic gains. By the late 1970s game theory had become one of the foundations of modern economics, and at the center was the Nash equilibrium.

Silvia Nasar 44:15
There are not more than 10 ideas in the post war period which we could say are equivalent. It had a huge impact in economics. It made economics a much more useful subject.

John Nash 44:35
I knew it was good work, but you cannot know how much something would be appreciated in the future. You don’t have that crystal ball.

Narrator 44:49
By the 1980s economists expected that game theory would be recognized with the Nobel Prize year after year. It didn’t happen. The committee in Stockholm could not conceivably dream of giving a Nobel prize if they couldn’t include John Nash as one of the deserving people. Members of the Nobel Committee worried that Nash was unstable and wouldn’t be able to handle the pressures of the ceremony. Some even feared he might do something that would embarrass the academy and tarnish the prize in beginning sometime in the 1980s after three decades of struggling with mental illness, John Nash experienced his second transformation.

John Nash 45:58
I don’t really remember the chronology very well, exactly when I moved from one type of thinking to another, I began arguing with the concept of the voices, and ultimately I began rejecting them, deciding not to listen.

Narrator 46:20
His descent into madness had been sudden. His reawakening was gradual, almost imperceptible.

Peter Weiden 46:31
A portion of schizophrenics after a long period of time, often do seem to get better, and how that occurs remains a mystery.

Narrator 46:46
Slowly he became more engaged and lucid word of his remarkable recovery spread. Those around him assumed new anti psychotic drugs were helping, but Nash had stopped taking medication in 1970

Harold Kuhn 47:06
I said, John, how in the devil have you recovered? He said, I willed it.

John Nash 47:13
I decided I was going to think rationally.

Marrna Nash Legg 47:16
He has said that he more or less put his hallucinations aside like a conscious decision. I mentioned that to somebody, and she said, well, why didn’t he do it sooner?

Silvia Nasar 47:30
The fact that people did not abandon him, that there were people who treated him like a human being made it possible for him to re emerge.

Herta Newman 47:48
This wonderful thing that happened to John could only happen in this little mathematical community that is very, very tolerant of certain aberrations and also, at the same time, incredibly admiring of gift or genius. That was what was important about Nash in that world, not that he was ill.

Unknown Speaker 48:13
Two American professors and a German researcher have been awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. The three winners of today’s Nobel Prize played major roles in bringing the principles of game theory to economics. Princeton’s John Nash was cited for developing what has become known as the Nash equilibrium, pioneering theory about the point at which conflicts get resolved.

Donald Newman 48:40
My wife said, John Nash. You don’t think that’s the John Nash that we know. I didn’t know John was still alive.

Marrna Nash Legg 48:53
I remember clearly I heard it on the radio, that’s John. And I cried. All I could think was, I wish my parents could know this.

Narrator 49:07
On December 10, 1994 at the age of 66 John Nash received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm.

Marrna Nash Legg 49:17
Dr John Nash, your analysis of equilibrium non cooperative games and all your other contributions to game theory have had a profound effect on the way economic theory has developed in the last two decades.

Harold Kuhn 49:30
Who’s the delighted. I was absolutely ecstatic, and so was my wife. We were so, it was so wonderful, jubilant. We danced around our kitchen. I mean, it was such a marvelous vindication that after all this time, this incredible acknowledgement is great.

Unknown Speaker 50:06
He shined very brightly as a young man. Then he had his illness, and is now a very pleasant, accomplished gentleman. It feels right somehow.

Narrator 50:26
John Nash lives in Princeton with Alicia and their son, Johnny, who is also a mathematician and suffers from schizophrenia. After a long estrangement, Nash has reconnected with his eldest son, John steer in the spring of 2001 38 years after their divorce, John and Alicia remarried. At Princeton, Nash has returned once again, to his work in mathematics.

Unknown Speaker 51:07
I think it teaches us that we have to appreciate the particular talents of people who may be very eccentric and look at things in very peculiar ways. Those are often the people who will really have the most stunning insights.

Silvia Nasar 51:24
He was someone who had been lost. I think that’s the inspiration that people can triumph over this disease. I think it’s incredibly inspiring.

John Nash 51:36
I’m not thinking anything crazy, but there are different possibilities. I don’t know what the future holds exactly, even if it’s not such a long future for me, of course, the future in general is presumably long unless things really go bad, or unless some miracle happens.

Eric Lee
aka H.narrator