A Beautiful Mind.Sylvia Nasar. New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of : Simon & Schuster Simon & Schuster U.S. publishing company. It was founded in 1924 by Richard L. Simon (1899–1960) and M. Lincoln Schuster (1897–1970), whose initial project, the original crossword-puzzle book, was a best-seller. , 1998. A Beautiful Mind is the biography of a mathematical genius who went mad, recovered late in life, and won the Nobel prize in Economics The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, commonly called the Nobel Prize in Economics, is a prize awarded each year for outstanding intellectual contributions in the field of economics. in 1994 for work he had done forty-five years earlier. John Forbes Nash John Forbes Nash, Jr. (born June 13 1928) is an American mathematician who works in game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations, serving as a Senior Research Mathematician at Princeton University. , Jr., was born in 1928 in a whistle-stop town in West Virginia. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in three years and was sent off to Princeton's elite graduate program in mathematics with a one line recommendation: "This man is a genius." At Princeton, he quickly made his mark with his twenty-six page Ph.D. thesis, a work on rational conflict and cooperation that was to supply one of the most influential ideas of the twentieth century, and become the basis for his Nobel prize. At thirty, as he was about to be made a full professor at MIT MIT - Massachusetts Institute of Technology , Nash experienced his first shattering episode of paranoid schizophrenia. For the next thirty years he suffered from severe delusions, hallucinations Hallucinations Definition Hallucinations are false or distorted sensory experiences that appear to be real perceptions. These sensory impressions are generated by the mind rather than by any external stimuli, and may be seen, heard, felt, and even , disordered thoughts and feelings, and a broken will. Saved from homelessness by his loyal ex-wife and protected by a small coterie of mathematical friends, Nash wandered wraith-like on the Princeton campus, scrawling number messages on blackboards, and mostly ignored. But his early achievements caused his name to resurface re·sur·face v. re·sur·faced, re·sur·fac·ing, re·sur·fac·es v.tr. To cover with a new surface: resurfacing a road; resurfaced the floor. v.intr. in academic circles and when he was 66 a spontaneous remission from his illness and a nomination for the Nobel prize gave him a second chance at life. The decision to award to Nash the Nobel prize was not without controversy. In fact, it turns out there was considerable behind-the-scenes dissension within the Nobel committee about the personal suitability of Nash for the prize, and about the nature of his research. As a result, the Nobel prize in economics has been essentially redefined as a prize in social sciences, although no public announcement of this change has been made. Nash currently lives in Princeton with his former wife (tragically, their son, a mathematician, also suffers from schizophrenia). This book documents the story of an inspiring struggle against a terrible illness, of genius finally rewarded, and of a woman who never stopped caring. And the author, an economics correspondent with The New York Times, tells that story in a most compelling manner. |
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