by Sylvia Nasar
I was a couple of years younger than Johnny. One day I was walking by his house on Country Club Hill and he was sitting on the front steps. He called for me to come over and touch his hands. I walked over to him, and when I touched his hands, I got the biggest shock I’d ever gotten in my life. He had somehow rigged up batteries and wires behind him, so that he wouldn’t get shocked but when I touched his hands, I got the living fire shocked out of me. After that he just smiled and I went on my way.50
Occasionally the pranks got him into hot water. One incident involving a small explosion in the high school chemistry lab landed him in the principal’s office.51 Another time, he and some other boys were picked up by the police for a curfew violation.52
When he was fifteen, Nash and a couple of boys from across the street, Donald Reynolds and Herman Kirchner, began fooling around with homemade explosives.53 They gathered in Kirchner’s basement, which they called their “laboratory,” where they made pipe bombs and manufactured their own gunpowder. They constructed cannons out of pipe and shot stuff through them. Once they managed to shoot a candle through a thick wooden board. One day Nash showed up at the lab holding a beaker. “I’ve just made some nitroglycerin,” he announced excitedly. Donald didn’t believe him. He told him “to go down to Crystal Rock and throw it over the cliff to see what would happen.” Nash did just that. “Luckily,” said Reynolds, “it didn’t work. He would have blown off the whole side of the mountain.” The bombmaking came to a horrifying end one afternoon in January 1944. Herman Kirchner, who was alone at the time, was building yet another pipe bomb when it exploded in his lap, severing an artery. He bled to death in the ambulance that came for him. Donald Reynolds’s parents packed him off to boarding school the following fall. For Nash, whose parents may or may not have known the extent of his involvement in the bombmaking, it was a sobering experience that brought home the dangers of his experiments.
He had grown up, essentially, without ever making a close friend. Just as he learned to deflect his parents’ criticism of his behavior with his intellectual achievements, he learned to armor himself against rejection by adopting a hard shell of indifference and using his superior intelligence to strike back. Julia Robinson, the first woman to become president of the American Mathematical Society, said in her autobiography that she believed that many mathematicians felt themselves to be ugly ducklings as children, unlovable and out of kilter with their more conventional, conforming peers.54 Johnny’s apparent sense of superiority, his standoffishness, and his occasional cruelty were ways of coping with uncertainty and loneliness. What he lost by his lack of genuine interaction with children his own age was a “lively sense, in reality, of his actual position in the human hierarchy” that prevents other children with more social contact from feeling either unrealistically weak or unrealistically powerful.55 If he could not believe he was lovable, then feeling powerful was a good substitute. As long as he could be successful, his self-esteem could remain intact.
Johnny chose the time-honored escape route from the confines of small-town life: He performed well in school. With Virginia’s encouragement, he took courses at Bluefield College. He read voraciously, mostly futuristic fantasy books, popular science magazines, and real science texts.56 “He was just an outstanding problem solver,” his high school chemistry teacher later told the Bluefield Daily Telegraph. “When I put a chemistry problem up on the blackboard, all the students would get out a pencil and a piece of paper. John wouldn’t move. He would stare at the formula on the board, then stand up politely and tell us the answer. He could do it all in his head. He never even took out a pencil or a piece of paper.”57 This youthful Gedanken experimentation actually helped shape the way he approached mathematical problems later on. His peers became more respectful. At a time when the war was making heroes out of scientists, Johnny’s classmates assumed he was slated to become one.58
In high school, Nash became friendly — though not close friends — with a couple of fellow students, John Williams and John Louthan, both sons of Bluefield College professors. The three rode a public bus to school together and Johnny helped Williams with Latin translations. Williams recalled, “We were attracted to him. He was an interesting guy. That was sort of it. I don’t think we ever went over to John’s house. It was pretty much of a school thing.”59 The three also constantly maneuvered to get out of their classes as much as possible. Before the widespread use of the SATs, college recruiters routinely came to the high school and would invite students to take their admissions tests. “We spent many mornings taking those tests,” Williams said.
At the beginning of the year, at Johnny’s instigation, they made a bet — no one remembers for how much — that they could make the honor roll without ever cracking a book. All three thought they were pretty smart but at the same time were contemptuous of grinds and teachers’ pets. “We kind of got drug into it by Nash,” Williams said. Nash, who was already taking a full load of courses at Bluefield College, never made the honor society, missing it by a few tenths of a percent. The other two did, though by a hair.
John Sr. suggested that Johnny apply to West Point, a suggestion that, once again, may have reflected the father’s anxiety that his son was not growing up well-rounded as much as it did the prospect of free college tuition. But as Martha said, “Even I could see that wouldn’t have worked.”60 Whatever fantasies he may have had about becoming a scientist, when asked to describe his career aspirations in an essay, Johnny wrote that he hoped to become an engineer like his father.61 He and John Sr. wrote an article together describing an improved method for calculating the proper tensions for electric cables and wires — a project that entailed weeks of field measurements — and published the results jointly in an engineering journal.62 Johnny entered the George Westinghouse competition and won a full scholarship, one often that were awarded nationally.63 The fact that Lloyd Shapley, a son of the famous Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, also won a Westinghouse that year made the achievement all the sweeter in the eyes of the Nash family. Johnny was accepted at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Because of the war all colleges were on accelerated schedules and operated year-round so that students could graduate in three years. Johnny left Bluefield for Pittsburgh, taking a train from nearby Hinton, in mid-June, a few weeks before the VE Day parade celebrating Hitler’s defeat.
2
Carnegie Institute of Technology June 1945–June 1948
In those days very few people became mathematicians. It was like becoming a concert pianist.
— RAOUL BOTT, 1995
NASH WENT TO PITTSBURGH to become a chemical engineer, but his growing interest was in mathematics. It was not long before he abandoned the laboratory and slide rule for Möbius knots and Diophantine equations.1
With its smelters, power plants, polluted rivers, and ubiquitous slag heaps, Pittsburgh was a city of violent strikes and frequent floods.2 So dense was the sulfurous haze that engulfed its downtown that travelers arriving by rail often mistook morning for midnight. The Carnegie Institute of Technology, perched halfway up Squirrel Hill, hardly escaped the inferno. The ivory-colored brick of its buildings — designed, or so students said, to serve as factories should Andrew Carnegie’s school fail — were glazed yellow black. Its walkways were gritty with soot particles the size of pebbles. Its students were forced, before a lecture was half over, to brush the cinders from their lecture notes. Even at high noon in midsummer, one could stare directly at the sun without blinking.
In that era, Carnegie was shunned by the local ruling elite, which sent its children east to Harvard and Princeton. Richard Cyert, who joined the Carnegie faculty after the war and would later become its president, recalled, “When I came this place was really very backward.”3 The engineering school, with its two thousand or so students, still resembled the trade school for sons and daughters of electricians and bricklayers that it had been at the turn of the century.
But like so many other colleges right after the war, Carnegie
was changing. Robert Doherty, its president, had seized the opportunities created by wartime research to turn the engineering school into a real university. He parlayed defense contracts and the prospect of ballooning enrollments into a big push to recruit brilliant young researchers in math, physics, and economics. “The theoretical sciences were being pushed very hard,” recalled Richard Duffin, a mathematician. “Doherty was trying to take CT into the big time.”4
Corporate giants like Westinghouse, whose headquarters were in Pittsburgh, supplied generous scholarships to lure talented young people to Carnegie. Among the scholarship recipients who entered Carnegie in 1945 were talented youngsters like Andy Warhol, the artist, as well as a group of young men who would eventually, like Nash, shun engineering for science and mathematics.5
Nash arrived by train in June 1945; gasoline rationing made car travel impractical.6 Carnegie Tech was still operating in wartime mode: classes went year-round, most campus activities remained canceled, and most of the fraternity houses were still shut. Within a year the campus would be inundated with veterans and classes would be jammed with these older students. But that June, two months before the war finally ended, it was mostly freshmen and sophomores who were on campus. The scholarship students were housed together in Welch Hall and took most of their classes together — small ones taught by hand-picked instructors, some of whom were first-rate. Nash took his first physics course from Immanuel Estermann, for example, a top-flight physicist who had done much of the experimental work that had netted Otto Stern, a German ómigró, the 1943 Nobel Prize for physics.7
Nash’s engineering aspirations did not survive his first semester, killed off by an unhappy experience in mechanical drawing: “I reacted negatively to the regimentation,” he later wrote.8 But chemistry, his newly chosen major, proved no better suited to his temperament or interests. He worked briefly as a lab assistant for one of his teachers but got into trouble for breaking equipment.9 He was so bored at his summer job at the Westinghouse Lab that he spent most of his two months there making and polishing a brass egg in the lab’s machine shop.10 The final blow was a C in physical chemistry, which he got after a running dispute with the professor over the lack of rigor of the mathematics in the course. David Lide recalled, “He refused to do the problems the way the professor expected.”11 Of chemistry in general Nash would complain: “It was not a matter of how well one could think … but of how well one could handle a pipette and perform titration in the laboratory.”12
Even as he struggled in the laboratory, Nash was already discovering a brilliant group of newcomers to Carnegie. By his sophomore year, Doherty’s program of upgrading the theoretical sciences had brought to Carnegie John Synge, nephew of the Irish playwright John Millington Synge, who became head of the mathematics department. Despite his startling appearance — Synge wore a black patch over one eye and a filter that protruded from one of his nostrils — he was a man of great charm who attracted younger scholars like Richard Duffin, Raoul Bott, and Alexander Weinstein, a European emigre whom Einstein had once invited to become a collaborator.13 When Albert Tucker, a Princeton topologist who did pathbreaking work in operations research, came to Carnegie to lecture that year, he was so impressed with the depth of mathematical talent at Carnegie that he confessed that he felt as if he were “bringing coals to Newcastle.”14
From the start, Nash dazzled his mathematics professors; one of them called him “a young Gauss.”15 He took courses in tensor calculus — the mathematical tool used by Einstein to formulate the general theory of relativity — and relativity from Synge.16 Synge was impressed with Nash’s originality and his appetite for difficult problems.17 He and others began urging Nash to major in mathematics and to consider an academic career. Nash’s doubts that one could make a living as a mathematician took some time to overcome. But by the middle of his second year he was concentrating almost exclusively on mathematics. The Westinghouse scholarship administrators were unhappy with Nash’s switch to mathematics, but by the time they learned of it, it was a fait accompli.18
College is a time when many ugly ducklings discover that they are swans, not just intellectually but socially. Most of the boys in Welch Hall — precocious but immature — found common interests, kindred spirits, and a measure of acceptance painfully lacking in high school. Hans Weinberger recalled, “We were all nerds back in our high schools and here we were able to talk to one another.”19
Nash was not so lucky. While his professors singled him out as a potential star, his new peers found him weird and socially inept. “He was a country boy, unsophisticated even by our standards,” recalled Robert Siegel, a physics major, who remembered that Nash had never attended a symphony performance before.20 He behaved oddly, playing a single chord on the piano over and over,21 leaving an ice cream cone melting on top of his castoff clothing in the lounge,22 walking on his roommate’s sleeping body to turn off a light,23 pouting when he lost a game of bridge.24
Nash was rarely invited to go to concerts or restaurants with the group. Paul Zweifel, an avid bridge player, taught Nash how to play bridge, but Nash’s pouting and inattention to the details of the game made him a poor partner. “He wanted to talk about the theoretical aspects.”25 Nash roomed with Weinberger for a term, but the two clashed constantly — Nash once pushed Weinberger around to end an argument26 — and Nash moved into a private room at the end of the hall. “He was extremely lonely,” recalled Siegel.27
Later in life, as his accomplishments multiplied, his peers would be more apt to be forgiving. But at Carnegie, where he was thrust together with other adolescents around the clock, he became a target. He was not so much bullied — the other boys were afraid of his strength and temper — as ostracized and relentlessly teased. That he was envied for his size and his brains only fueled the teasing. “He was the butt of people’s jokes because he was different,” recalled George Hinman, a physics student.28 “Here was a guy who was socially underdeveloped and acting much younger. You do what you can to make his life miserable,” Zweifel admitted. “We tormented poor John. We were very unkind. We were obnoxious. We sensed he had a mental problem.”29
• • •
That first summer, Nash, Paul Zweifel, and a third boy spent an afternoon exploring the subterranean maze of steam tunnels under Carnegie. In the dark, Nash suddenly turned to the others and blurted out, “Gee, if we got trapped down here we’d have to turn homo.” Zweifel, who was fifteen, found the remark pretty odd. But during Thanksgiving break, in the deserted dormitory, Nash climbed into Zweifel’s bed when the latter was sleeping and made a pass at him.30
Away from home, living in close proximity with other adolescents, Nash discovered that he was attracted to other boys. He spoke and acted in ways that seemed natural to him only to find himself exposed to his peers’ contempt. Zweifel and other boys in the dormitory started calling Nash “Homo” and “Nash-Mo.”31 “Once the statement was made,” George Siegel said, “it stuck. John took a lot.”32 No doubt, he found the label hurtful and humiliating, but his anger is all that anyone witnessed.
The boys made him the butt of various pranks. One time, Weinberger and a couple of others used a footlocker as a battering ram to break down Nash’s door.33 Another time, Zweifel and a few others, knowing of Nash’s extreme aversion to cigarette smoke, rigged up a contraption that smoked an entire pack of cigarettes and collected the smoke. “A bunch of us crowded around John’s door and blew the smoke under it,” Zweifel recalled. “Almost instantaneously, his room filled up with cigarette smoke.”34 Nash exploded in rage. “He came roaring out of his room, picked up Jack [Wachtman], and threw him down on the bed,” said Zweifel. “He ripped off Wachtman’s shirt and bit him in the back. Then he ran out of the room.”
At other times, Nash defended himself the only way he knew how. He wasn’t practiced in invective, sarcasm, or ridicule, so he went for childish displays of contempt. “ ’You stupid fool,’ he’d say,” Siegel recalled. “He was openly contemptuous of people
who he didn’t think were up to his level intellectually. He showed that contempt for all of us: ’You’re an ignoramus.’ ” After a year or so, after he had acquired a reputation for being a genius, he began to hold court in Skibo Hall, the student center.35 Like the fairground magician with his swords, he would sit in a chair and challenge other students to throw problems at him to solve. A. lot of students came to him with their homework. He was a star — but an outcast too.
Nash stared glumly at the announcement tacked to the bulletin board outside the math department office in Administration Hall, which looked, even on the sunniest of days, like the inside of the Lincoln Tunnel. He stood in front of the board for a long time. He hadn’t made it into the top five.36
Nash’s fantasy of instant glory crumbled. The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition was a prestigious national tournament for undergraduates, sponsored by an old-money Boston family known mostly for its Harvard presidents and deans.37 Today the contest attracts upward of two thousand participants. In March 1947, it was a decade old and drew about 120. But even then, it was the first chance to establish one’s rank in the world of mathematics as well as to seize the limelight.
Then, as now, contestants were given a dozen problems and half an hour each to solve them. The problems were famously difficult. In any given year, the median score out of 120 possible points was zero. That meant that at least half the contestants weren’t able to obtain so much as partial credit for even a single problem, and this in spite of the fact that most contestants had been chosen by their departments to compete. To have a prayer of winning — placing in the top five — a young mathematician had to be super-fast or especially ingenious. The prizes involved a nominal amount of money, twenty to forty dollars for each of the top ten contestants, and two hundred to four hundred dollars for each of the top five school teams, but winners became instant mini-celebrities in the mathematics world and were virtually assured a spot in a top graduate program. Different graduate programs pay more or less attention to the Putnam, but at Harvard it is, and always has been, a very, very big deal. That year Harvard pledged a fifteen-hundred-dollar scholarship to one of the winners.