by Sylvia Nasar
Although he was no prodigy, Johnny was a bright and curious child. His mother, with whom he was always closest, responded by making his education a principal focus of her considerable energy. “Mother was a natural teacher,” Martha observes. “She liked to read, she liked to teach. She wasn’t just a housewife.” Virginia, who became actively involved in the PTA, taught Johnny to read by age four, sent him to a private kindergarten, saw to it that he skipped half a grade early in elementary school, tutored him at home and, later on, in high school, had him enroll at Bluefield College to take courses in English, science, and math. John Sr.’s hand in his son’s education was less visible. More distant than Virginia, he nonetheless shared his interests with his children — taking Johnny and Martha on Sunday drives to inspect power lines, for example — and, more important, supplied answers to his son’s incessant questions about electricity, geology, weather, astronomy, and other technological subjects and the natural world. A neighbor remembers that John Sr. always spoke to his children as if they were adults: “He never gave Johnny a coloring book. He gave him science books.”20
At school, Johnny’s immaturity and social awkwardness were initially more apparent than any special intellectual gifts. His teachers labeled him an under-achiever. He daydreamed or talked incessantly and had trouble following directions, a source of some conflict between him and his mother. His fourth-grade report card, in which music and mathematics were his lowest marks, contained a note to the effect that Johnny needed “improvement in effort, study habits and respect for the rules.” He gripped his pencil like a stick, his handwriting was atrocious, and he was somewhat inclined to use his left hand. John Sr. insisted he write only with his right hand. Virginia eventually made him enroll in a penmanship course at a local secretarial college, where he learned a certain style of printing and also how to type. A newspaper clipping from Virginia’s scrapbook shows him sitting in a classroom with rows and rows of teenage girls, his eyes rolled up in his head, looking stupefyingly bored. Complaints about his writing, his talking out of turn or even “monopolizing the class discussion,” and his sloppiness dogged him right through the end of high school.21
His best friends were books, and he was always happiest learning on his own. Nash alludes to his preference obliquely in his autobiographical essay:
My parents provided an encyclopedia, Comptons Pictured Encyclopedia, that I learned a lot from by reading it as a child. And also there were other books available from either our house or the house of the grandparents that were of educational value.22
And the best time of day was after dinner every evening when John Sr. would sit at his desk in the small family room off the living room, the size of a sleeping porch, and John Jr. could sprawl in front of the radio, listening to classical music or news reports, or reading either the encyclopedia or the family’s stacks of well-worn Life and Time magazines, and ask his father questions.
His great passion was experimenting. By the time he was twelve or so, he had turned his room into a laboratory. He tinkered with radios, fooled around with electrical gadgets, and did chemistry experiments.23 A neighbor recalls Johnny rigging the Nash telephone to ring with the receiver off.24
Though he had no close companions, he enjoyed performing in front of other children. At one point, he would hold on to a big magnet that was wired with electricity to show how much current he could endure without flinching.25 Another time, he’d read about an old Indian method for making oneself immune to poison ivy. He wrapped poison ivy leaves in some other leaves and swallowed them whole in front of a couple of other boys.26
One afternoon, he went to a carnival that had come to Bluefield.27 The crowd of children he was with clustered around a sideshow. There was a man sitting in an electric chair holding swords in each of his hands. Sparks flashed and danced between the two tips. He challenged anyone in the crowd to do the same. Johnny Nash, then about twelve, stepped forward and grabbed the swords and repeated the man’s trick. “There’s nothing to it,” he said as he rejoined the others. How did you do that? asked one of the children. “Static electricity,” answered Nash before launching into a more detailed explanation.
Johnny’s lack of interest in childish pursuits and lack of friends were major sources of worry for his parents. An ongoing effort to make him more “well rounded” became a family obsession.28 Whether his apparent resolve to march to his own drummer was a question of his temperament or of his parents’ concerted efforts to change his nature, the result was his withdrawal into his own private world. Martha, with whom Johnny constantly bickered, recalls:
Johnny was always different. [My parents] knew he was different. And they knew he was bright. He always wanted to do things his way. Mother insisted I do things for him, that I include him in my friendships. She wanted me to get him dates. She was right. But I wasn’t too keen on showing off my somewhat odd brother.
The Nashes pushed Johnny as hard socially as they did academically. At first, it was Boy Scout camp and Sunday Bible classes; later on, lessons at the Floyd Ward dancing school and membership in the John Aldens Society, a youth organization devoted to improving the manners of its members. By high school, the outgoing Martha was always being enlisted to include her older brother when she socialized with friends. And in the summer holidays, the Nashes insisted that Johnny get jobs, including one at the Bluefield Daily Telegraph. In order to get him to the paper, “they got up at the wee hours of the night,” Martha said. “They thought it was very important in helping make him well rounded. With a brain like John’s, it seemed even more important. My mother and father didn’t want him to be inside all the time with his hobbies and inventions.”29
Johnny did not openly rebel — he dutifully trotted off to camp, dancing school, Bible classes, and, later on, blind dates arranged by his sister at Virginia’s urging — but he did these things mainly to please his parents, especially his mother, and acquired neither friends nor social graces as a result. He continued to treat sports, going to church, the dances at the country club, visits with his cousins — all the things that so many of his peers found fascinating and enjoyable — as tedious distractions from his books and experiments. Always last to be chosen in softball, Johnny would stand in the right outfield, staring at the clouds above, eating bits of grass. Martha describes one occasion on which Virginia insisted he accompany the family to an Appalachian Power Company dinner. Johnny went, but spent the evening riding up and down in the elevator, which mesmerized him, until it broke — much to his parents’ embarrassment. And on his summer jobs he found ways to entertain himself. One of Nash’s classmates recalled that Nash, after disappearing for hours from his post at Bluefield Supply, was discovered rigging an elaborate system of mousetraps.30 At a dance, he pushed a stack of chairs onto the dance floor and danced with them rather than with a girl.31
Virginia kept scrapbooks chronicling her children’s lives and accomplishments. In one of them is a faded and yellowed essay by one Angelo Patri, clipped from a newspaper, covered with her pen marks, underlinings, and circles — poignant hints of her hopes and fears:
Queer little twists and quirks go into the making of an individual. To suppress them all and follow clock and calendar and creed until the individual is lost in the neutral gray of the host is to be less than true to our inheritance… . Life, that gorgeous quality of life, is not accomplished by following another man’s rules. It is true we have the same hungers and same thirsts, but they are for different things and in different ways and in different seasons… . Lay down your own day, follow it to its noon, your own noon, or you will sit in an outer hall listening to the chimes but never reaching high enough to strike your own.32
The earliest hint of Johnny’s mathematical talent, ironically, was a B-minus in fourth-grade arithmetic. The teacher told Virginia that Johnny couldn’t do the work, but it was obvious to his mother that he had merely found his own ways of solving problems. “He was always looking for different ways to do things,” his sister commen
ted.33 More experiences like this followed, especially in high school, when he often succeeded in showing, after a teacher had struggled to produce a laborious, lengthy proof, that the proof could be accomplished in two or three elegant steps.
There is no sign of a mathematical pedigree in Nash’s ancestry or any indication that mathematics was much in the air at the Nash household. Virginia Nash was literary. And for all his interest in contemporary developments in science and technology, John Sr. was not well-versed in abstract mathematics. Nash does not recall ever discussing his later research with his father.34 Martha’s recollections of dinner-table discussions were that they revolved around the meaning of words, books the children were reading, and current events.
The first bite of the mathematical apple probably occurred when Nash at around age thirteen or fourteen read E. T. Bell’s extraordinary book, Men of Mathematics — an experience he alludes to in his autobiographical essay.35 Bell’s book, which was published in 1937, would have given Nash the first glimpse of real mathematics, a heady realm of symbols and mysteries entirely unconnected to the seemingly arbitrary and dull rules of arithmetic and geometry taught in school or even to the entertaining but ultimately trivial calculations that Nash carried out in the course of chemistry and electrical experiments.
Men of Mathematics consists of lively — and, as it turns out, not entirely accurate — biographical sketches.36 Its flamboyant author, a professor of mathematics at the California Institute of Technology, declared himself disgusted with “the ludicrous untruth of the traditional portrait of the mathematician” as a “slovenly dreamer totally devoid of common sense.” He assured his readers that the great mathematicians of history were an exceptionally virile and even adventuresome breed. He sought to prove his point with vivid accounts of infant precocity, monstrously insensitive educational authorities, crushing poverty, jealous rivals, love affairs, royal patronage, and many varieties of early death, including some resulting from duels. He even went so far, in defending mathematicians, as to answer the question “How many of the great mathematicians have been perverts?” None, was his answer. “Some lived celibate lives, usually on account of economic disabilities, but the majority were happily married… . The only mathematician discussed here whose life might offer something of interest to a Freudian is Pascal.”37 The book became a bestseller as soon as it appeared.
What makes Bell’s account not merely charming, but intellectually seductive, are his lively descriptions of mathematical problems that inspired his subjects when they were young, and his breezy assurance that there were still deep and beautiful problems that could be solved by amateurs, boys of fourteen, to be specific. It was Bell’s essay on Fermat, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time but a perfectly conventional seventeenth-century French magistrate whose life was “quiet, laborious and uneventful,” that caught Nash’s eye.38 The main interest of Fermat, who shares the credit for inventing calculus with Newton and analytic geometry with Descartes, was number theory —“the higher arithmetic.” Number theory “investigates the mutual relationships of those common whole numbers, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 … which we utter almost as soon as we learn to talk.”
For Nash, proving a theorem known as Fermat’s Theorem about prime numbers, those mysterious integers that have no divisor besides themselves and one, produced an epiphany of sorts. Other mathematical geniuses, Einstein and Bertrand Russell among them, recount similarly revelatory experiences in early adolescence. Einstein recalled the “wonder” of his first encounter with Euclid at age twelve:
Here were assertions, as for example the intersection of three altitudes of a triangle at one point which — though by no means evident — could nevertheless be proved with such certainty that any doubt appeared to be out of the question. This lucidity and certainty made an indescribable impression on me.39
Nash does not describe his feelings when he succeeded in devising a proof for Fermat’s assertion that if n is any whole number and p any prime, then n multiplied by itself p times minus n is divisible by p.40 But he notes the fact in his autobiographical essay, and his emphasis on this concrete result of his initial encounter with Fermat suggests that the thrill of discovering and exercising his own intellectual powers — as much as any sense of wonder inspired by hitherto unsuspected patterns and meanings — was what made this moment such a memorable one. That thrill has been decisive for many a future mathematician. Bell describes how success in solving a problem posed by Fermat led Carl Friedrich Gauss, the renowned German mathematician, to choose between two careers for which he was similarly talented. “It was this discovery… which induced the young man to choose mathematics instead of philology as his life work.”41
However heady it may have been to prove a theorem of Fermat’s, the experience was hardly enough to plant the notion in Nash’s mind that he might himself become a mathematician. Although as a high-school student Nash took mathematics at Bluefield College, as late as his senior year, when he already had gone much further into number theory, he still had firmly in mind following in his father’s footsteps and becoming an electrical engineer. It was only after he had entered Carnegie Tech, with enough math to skip most entry-level courses, that his professors would convince him mathematics, for a chosen few, was a realistic choice as a profession.
The Japanese attack on the Pearl Harbor naval base in Hawaii, on December 7, 1941, came halfway through Johnny’s first year in high school. A few days later, Johnny and Mop, as he called his younger sister, got a lesson from their father in how to shoot a .22 caliber rifle.42 He drove them up to a ridge where the power lines cut a wide swath through the scrubby, snow-dusted pine wood. Pointing toward the town below, huddling under a sooty gray cloud, he told them, in the soft, formal way he had of addressing his children, that the Japanese wouldn’t rest until they had reached their West Virginia hometown, remote and surrounded by mountains as it was, because blowing up the coal trains was the only way they could cripple the mighty American war machine.
A .22, he said, was only a squirrel gun. You couldn’t even kill a deer or a bear with one. But it was easier than a heavier gun for women and children to handle. They had no choice, really. The Japanese wouldn’t be satisfied with destroying trains. They’d raze the city, round up all the men, murder all the civilians, even schoolchildren like them. If you could shoot this thing, you might be able to stop someone who was coming after you long enough to run away and hide someplace until the army rescued you. Years later, when Johnny Nash saw secret signs of invaders everywhere and believed that he, and only he, could keep the universe safe, he would be sick with anxiety, shaking and sweating and sleepless for hours and days at a time. But on that bright December afternoon, he was excited and happy as he fingered the rifle.
The war came thundering through Bluefield, West Virginia, in the roaring, rattling shapes of freight car after car heaped high with coal from the great Pocahontas coalfield in the mountains to the west — 40 percent of all the coal fueling the war machine — and troop trains crowded with sailors and soldiers, round-faced farm boys from Iowa and Indiana and edgy factory hands from Pittsburgh and Chicago.43 The war shook and rattled the city out of its Depression slumber, filling its warehouses and streets, making overnight fortunes for scrap speculators and wheeler-dealers of all kinds. Workers were suddenly in short supply and there were jobs for everybody who wanted them. Bluefield teenagers hung around the train station watching it all, attended war bond rallies (Greer Garson showed up at one), and in school took part in tin can drives and bought war bonds with books of ten-cent stamps they bought in school. The war made a lot of Bluefield boys want to hurry and grow up lest the war be over before they were eligible to join. But Johnny didn’t feel that way, his sister recalled. He did become obsessed with inventing secret codes consisting, as one former schoolmate recalled, of weird little animal and people hieroglyphics, sometimes adorned with biblical phrases: Though the Wealthy Be Great/Roll in splendor and State/I envy them not,/I declare it
Boredom and simmering adolescent aggression led him to play pranks, occasionally ones with a nasty edge. He caricatured classmates he disliked with weird little cartoons. He later told a fellow mathematician at MIT that, as a youngster, he had sometimes “enjoyed torturing animals.”48 He once constructed a Tinkertoy rocking chair, wired it electrically, and tried to get Martha to sit in it.49 He played a similar prank on a neighboring child. Nelson Walker, head of Bluefield’s Chamber of Commerce, told a newspaper reporter the following story: