A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar

  He sailed on the Queen Mary, stopped briefly in London, and went to Paris.55 There he tried to get in touch with Grothendieck, who evidently wasn’t in town.56 After hanging around a few more days, Nash flew to Rome. He was, as he later said, thinking of himself as a “great but secret religious figure.”57 This may have accounted for his desire to be in Rome, where, as he later said, he visited “the Forum and the catacombs but avoided the Vatican.”58 The Pope was, in any case, not in Rome at the time.

  He was standing in front of the Forum when he began to hear voices “like telepathic phone calls from private individuals.”59 They seemed to him, at the time, he said in Madrid in 1996, to be the voices of “mathematicians opposed to my ideas.” He wrote in a letter later in the 1960s: “I observed the local Romans show a considerable interest in getting into telephone booths and talking on the telephone and one of their favorite words was pronto. So it’s like ping-pong, pinging back again the bell pinged to me.”60 Something odd was happening, he concluded. Harold Kuhn later said, “The stream of words was obviously being fed into a central machine where they were translated into English. The machine inserted the words, now in English, into his brain.”61

  Nash, however, did send a postcard from Rome, dated September 1, saying that he was returning to Paris and that he had attempted to contact Grothendieck and other mathematicians.62 He said he would be staying at the Grand Hotel de Mont Blanc, where he and Alicia had stayed five years earlier. Two days later, he was back in Paris, but had not yet managed to see Grothendieck, who was apparently away.63 The staff at the IHES “suggested contacting Jean-Pierre Serre,” but Serre does not remember Nash’s ever getting in touch with him.64 Nash’s next postcard home was a collage: a card devoid of any writing, with a Parisian scene and a French coin and a long number for a return address.65

  Meanwhile, Nash had not informed the mathematics department at Princeton that he was not intending to take their offer. Finally, on September 15, Tucker sent a terse note to Dean Brown, canceling the appointment and saying that Nash had gone to the University of Paris.66

  Nash hung around Paris a few more weeks until he finally gave up. In mid-September, he wrote to Virginia from Paris that he would be returning on the Queen Mary on the twenty-fourth, adding a postscript: “Situation looks dismal.”67

  Back in Princeton, Nash took to calling people again and turning up at the Institute to write strange messages on the blackboards of various seminar rooms. Atle Selberg recalled one such message involving several Social Security numbers. “He tried to find mysterious patterns,” Selberg recalled. “He claimed that he was born in a county named Mercer that had a town named Princeton. He seemed to find this a mysterious sign.”68

  By mid-December, Nash was back in Carrier. Once again, it was Alicia who had to make the painful decision. A letter written to John Milnor shows how fast Nash’s thoughts were racing and how one association prompted another — even as Nash was conscious that Milnor would find the letter mad. Labeled “crazy letter for your entertainment,” it was a fantastic monologue, skipping from slave calendars and lunar eclipses to advertising jingles and equations from Milnor’s papers.69

  Mele once again took over Nash’s care and Nash once again responded quickly and dramatically to antipsychotic drugs. He was well enough in early April 1965 to leave Carrier for the day to attend a banquet with John Danskin at another game-theory conference in Princeton.70 As Danskin recalled, “Nash’s name was being mentioned a lot at the meeting. I thought it would be nice to produce him.”71 Once Nash learned that he would be going, he telephoned Harold Kuhn and asked him to bring a couple of game-theory books to Carrier, which Kuhn did, recalling that “it was a barracks-like place, not much privacy.”72 Nash stayed on at Carrier until midsummer, his departure delayed until Mele was confident that both a job and a psychiatrist were waiting for his patient.

  In April Richard Palais, a mathematician at Brandeis, drove down to the institute to turn in a manuscript. “That day Borel said why not have lunch with Jack Milnor and me. We had lunch,” he recalled.73 Halfway through they started talking about Nash. Milnor and Borel thought Nash was much better now. They thought it would be a good thing for him to gradually get back to academic life. They believed Boston would be a good place. MIT and Harvard would be too difficult after he had insisted on resigning from MIT and threatened to sue the university. The Harvard department was too small. There was no way they were going to hire him. The Institute in those days didn’t have five-year memberships, and it was almost unheard of to have someone more than two years.74

  Norman Levinson, who had been in contact with Mele, Milnor, and Borel, offered to support Nash with his ONR and NSF grants. He felt that it was too soon for Nash to have an office at MIT Palais recalled:

  I had a feeling they were on the level in helping him get back to the mainstream and that it would be better for him to be in Cambridge, away from Princeton. It was very late. I’m surprised we were able to do anything. But the [Brandeis] administration really liked the math department and Joe [Kohn, then chairman] would go and get what we wanted.

  There was a lot of that feeling [about Nash]. People were expecting an awful lot from this guy. In any four- or five-year span, there are one or two young bright people who are recognized as special. Everybody tries to get them. He was coming into that category. He was very special.75

  When Nash got out of Carrier this time, in mid-July, he spent a couple of nights at John Milnor’s house and then took a train to Boston.76 He was, once again, hopeful and, in contrast to a year earlier, accepted the likelihood that he might have to start a new life without Alicia.

  43

  Solitude Boston, 1965–67

  IT WAS STRANGE to be back in Boston alone and after an absence of half a dozen years. The city had changed almost as much as Nash himself. Sundays were the bleakest. Nash’s “traditional Sunday[s]” as he called them, were spent alone, sitting in one of the libraries trying to work, or, more often, walking for hours at a time, and then stopping to watch the ice skaters and hockey players in the Public Garden.1 The evenings were given over, more often than not, to writing letters, one to Alicia, one to Virginia, and one to Martha, with whom Nash had lately developed a warmer, more confidential relationship.2 Mailing the letters provided an excuse for a final nighttime stroll.

  Weekdays, when he commuted to Waltham in a ratty old Nash Rambler convertible purchased on his arrival in Boston, were better. He was almost enjoying being at Brandeis. The place was undeniably lively, full of former students and acquaintances from the old days in Cambridge, former MIT undergraduates like Joseph Kohn, now chairman of the math department, and Al Vasquez, now an assistant professor. He liked having an office again, going to seminars, eating lunch with other mathematicians, tossing around ideas and mathematical gossip.

  But he was terribly lonely. He missed Alicia and John Charles. He felt his new, humbler status in the mathematical hierarchy most acutely. But he also could see, perhaps for the first time since the onset of his illness, that there was, after all, a future for him, and he entertained hopes of reestablishing himself as an academic and even of finding someone new to share life with.

  He had left Princeton almost immediately after being released from Carrier on July 29, traveling to Boston by train and staying in a Cambridge hotel while he found an apartment and a car.3 He had seen Norman Levinson, who, in his gruff, taciturn, immensely tactful way, had let Nash know that he would be paying Nash’s salary with National Science Foundation and Navy grants, and that he hoped Nash would be able to pursue his own research ideas, as before. He would have no teaching responsibilities, at least in the fall, which was a relief.4

  He started to see a thirty-three-year-old psychiatrist, Pattison Esmiol. An affable Coloradan with a medical degree from Harvard, Esmiol had just left the Navy to open a private practice in Brookline. Esmiol prescribed an antipsychotic drug, Stelazine, similar to Thorazine. Nash didn’t like the drug and its side effects, worryi
ng that they would prevent him from thinking clearly enough to resume mathematical work. But Esmiol, sympathetic to his client’s concerns, kept the doses as low as possible, and Nash was grateful for the dependable human contact of his weekly appointments.

  Nash was seeing Eleanor and John David, now a tall, handsome boy of twelve, every week or so.5 Nash was glad for the dinners Eleanor cooked him and glad to have the company. The three of them spent Halloween together, he wrote to Virginia.6 However, the old tensions in his relationship with Eleanor quickly surfaced again, and there were new and unanticipated tensions between himself and John David. Nash described Halloween as a “sad” occasion, for example, although it was not clear whether the sadness stemmed from friction that arose during the evening, or simply from a realization that his long separation from his son had produced a gulf that he could see no obvious way of bridging. John David was a particularly beautiful boy, musical and obviously bright. But Nash found it difficult to hide his dismay over his son’s faulty grammar and indifferent performance in school — all John David had to do was to let a “you was” slip out and Nash would be all over him;7 this, of course led to flare-ups with Eleanor and a rekindling of all the old resentments. John Stier recalls his father’s visits as “frustrating.” “He was always humming,” Stier said. “He’d eat. He’d chill out. He’d leave. He never helped me with my homework or asked how I was doing. He was just very aloof.”8

  Before he became a teenager and he and Eleanor began living in Hyde Park, John Stier lived in two dozen different places, with and without his mother.9 They included, between infancy and six, a series of foster homes in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, an orphanage on the outskirts of Boston, and when finally reunited with Eleanor, the Charden Home for Women and Children, a home for the destitute (no boys over age nine allowed!). In some school years, he attended three new schools and was deemed a “behavior problem.” On one occasion, he was held back. The moves were prompted by the calamities that are regular events in the lives of poor families: lost jobs, ill health, lack of childcare, fear of crime. On one occasion, Eleanor recalled, “I had a woman taking care of him. She said John had been bad to her little boy. So she hit him and gave him a black eye. I didn’t work for a while. I was always on edge.”10

  It was, as he said, “a miserable childhood, a shitty childhood.”11 His mother loved him, of course, but was herself desperately unhappy. Eleanor was often ill, suffering at times from severe anemia, frequently lost jobs, and when she was working often held two jobs. John David’s illegitimacy was a dirty secret; Eleanor concocted a tale to explain away his fatherlessness and the child was forced to tell it at the different schools and neighborhoods, while living in constant dread of discovery. “There was a real stigma,” John Stier said. “I had to lie.”

  In John David’s eyes, however, his father’s sudden reappearance in his life was a fine thing. Being corrected for the way he spoke and being admonished to work harder in school conveyed not just criticism, but fatherly interest. Nash also promised to pay for John David’s college education, explaining that “his educational background will shape the whole future course of his life.” Nash sometimes took pains to please his son. On Saturdays, he would take John Stier and a friend bowling. Afterward, they’d go to a Chinese restaurant for dinner. On John Stier’s thirteenth birthday, Nash surprised him by taking him to a neighborhood bicycle shop and buying him a ten-speed racer. The next year, perhaps partly inspired by his father’s interest in him, John Stier worked extremely hard in school, took a citywide examination, and got a place in one of Boston’s elite “exam” schools.

  In January, Nash wrote that “I have less time for Eleanor,” hinting perhaps that he felt his early dependence on her company easing and feeling some relief on this account.12 This would have given Eleanor new grounds for grievance; she may well have felt that he was once again using her without much intention of giving her very much in return. But at the end of February, Eleanor and John David were “among my few social contacts.”13 There were repeated flare-ups. “Eleanor was not nice to me,” he wrote after they went to a restaurant together.14 In April when Eleanor moved to a new apartment, several days went by before she was willing to give him her new telephone number.15 In May there is another reference to Eleanor’s not being nice, which again made Nash feel rather “sad.”16 If Nash’s reappearance in Boston raised again the possibility of his marrying Eleanor — either in her mind or his — there is no hint of this in Nash’s letters to Martha. Nash still had not completely given up hope of a reconciliation with Alicia.

  On that sad Halloween, he had been thinking a great deal of Alicia. “I was very fond of her,” he wrote to Virginia.17 His sadness on that night probably had a good deal to do with the fact that she was discouraging him from visiting her in Princeton, as he had hoped to do, on Thanksgiving. She apparently put him off with excuses, citing among other things “propriety.”18 Nash persisted and Alicia continued to discourage him, so that a week before the holiday Nash said that he still had no invitation. Alicia was now talking of his coming down at Christmas, but it is not clear that the visit took place. In and amongst it all, perhaps because he was now aware of John David’s discomfort around him, he expressed fear that his younger son, John Charles, was “forgetting his father.”19

  It was not all that easy to renew his old acquaintanceships, though he saw a bit of Arthur Mattuck and his wife, Joan, as well as Marvin and Gloria Minsky.20 People were kind but busy. He was anxious for anything to fill his evenings and went to a great many movies, plays, and concerts by himself.21 Alicia, who continued gently to discourage any possibility of reconciliation, was encouraging him to find some female companionship. He wrote to Martha: “Alicia doesn’t leave much hope.”22 In January, Nash was making awkward inquiries about dating.23 He thought of inviting the Mattucks to his house for a meal and “making it a foursome.” Jean Mattuck reintroduced him, apparently, to Emma Duchane, who later could recall none of this.24 He pursued Emma for several weeks, saying to Martha, “She’s a good conversationalist, but she isn’t pretty really,” before discovering that Emma had a fiance.

  After seeing A Hard Day’s Night one Sunday afternoon in early November, he was seized by a terrible sense of regret that he poured into a poignant and introspective letter to Martha, full of references to the struggle between his “merciless superego” and “old simple me.” This is the letter in which Nash referred to the “special friendships” in his life and his realization, in 1959, of “how things had been.” He admits that “away from contact with a few special sorts of individuals I am lost, lost completely in the wilderness… .”

  Brandeis was lively. A post-Sputnik infusion of money and a commitment on the university’s part to building a serious graduate program in mathematics had attracted eight or nine young comers, all in their thirties. “We had lots of research money. We had plenty of money to pay for research associates and part-time instructors. We did everything together,” recalled Richard Palais.25 The atmosphere was friendly and informal, and Nash felt welcome there. “Everybody was well aware that he was a first-class mathematician,” said Palais, adding:

  I ate with him most lunches. It was nice to see him more or less back. He was pretty sane. He was being treated with antipsychotic drugs. He was a much nicer person after he got sick than before. I kind of knew him when I was an instructor at Harvard, but not personally. I’d ask him a question. He’d be all snotty, proud of himself. You’d be afraid to ask him anything. He’d put you down without a thought. Typically, I’d say, “I have this problem,” and Nash would shoot back, “Oh my God, how can you ask me this question? How stupid are you? How come you don’t know this?” Afterward, he was nice, gentle, lots of fun to talk to. This old ego stuff was gone.

  Vasquez has similar memories: “When Nash first showed up at Brandeis he was pretty zombielike. At the beginning, he said nothing. That changed over the course of the year. He got more and more normal. He started interacting with peo
ple. We mostly talked about mathematics. He never talked about his personal life.”26

  Nash’s renewed appetite for life was most evident in the energy with which he was able to work that year. During that fall at Brandeis he wrote a long paper, “Analyticity of Solutions of Implicit Function Problems with Analytic Data,”27 that pursued to their natural conclusion his ideas about partial differential equations. He circulated his draft for comments and submitted the paper to the Annals of Mathematics in early January.28 Armand Borel, one of the editors, sent it to Jürgen Moser to referee. After a few telephone consultations between Borel and Nash, Nash quickly revised the paper and got a final acceptance from the Annals on February 15. Nash was thrilled, writing to Martha on Washington’s birthday that the Annals was “the most prestigious American mathematical journal.”29

  His renewed productivity produced a rush of self-confidence. He went to see Oscar Zariski at Harvard to discuss some new ideas — and possibly to inquire about a visiting position. He made friends with a young German mathematician, Egbert Brieskorn, who was visiting at MIT that year. He showed Brieskorn his just-completed paper and talked over ideas for future work. Brieskorn was doing some interesting work in singularities. “Nash had interesting ideas,” Brieskorn recalled. “He was always making propositions about what one could do. But I always got the feeling that he either couldn’t or wouldn’t do them himself.”’30 A touch of Nash’s old arrogance returned. There was some talk, apparently, of his teaching at Northeastern in the spring. “I’d rather be at a more famous place,” he confided to Martha. He thought he would apply for a position at MIT instead. He wrote Martha that he felt MIT ought to reinstate him, adding, “Of course, MIT isn’t the most distinguished … Harvard ranks much higher.”31 Throughout the spring he would fret about being forced to take a position at a second-rate institution: “I hope to avoid stepping down in social status because it may be difficult to come up again.”