A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar

  They ate, not in the main, formal restaurant, but downstairs in a small cafeteria. Weibull, a gentle, soft-spoken man, asked Nash questions about his work. Sometimes the conversation took odd turns. When Weibull asked Nash about refining the Nash equilibrium concept by, perhaps, taking into account irrational moves by players, Nash answered him by talking, not about irrationality, but about immortality. But on the whole, Nash struck Weibull as no more eccentric, irrational, or paranoid than many other academics. Weibull learned interesting details about Nash’s game theory papers that he hadn’t known. Nash had gotten his idea for the bargaining solution as an undergraduate at Carnegie Tech by thinking about trade agreements between nations. While he had used both Brouwer’s and Kakutani’s fixed-point theorems to prove his equilibrium result, he still thought that the proof relying on Brouwer was both more beautiful and more apt. He said that von Neumann had opposed his idea of equilibrium, but that Tucker had supported him.

  Afterward, though, what stood out for Weibull about the meeting, and the thing that transformed him that day from a detached observer and objective informant into an ardent advocate, was something Nash said before they walked into the club. “Can I go in?” Nash had asked uncertainly. “I’m not faculty.” That this great, great man did not feel that he had a right to eat in the faculty club struck Weibull as an injustice that demanded remedy.

  By the summer of 1993, rumors about a possible prize in game theory were rampant.32 A very small, very select symposium on game theory had taken place in mid-June, at what used to be Alfred Nobel’s old dynamite factory in Bjorkborn, a few hundred kilometers north of Stockholm.33 Such symposia, sponsored by the prize committee, are invariably seen as Nobel beauty contests. This one was organized by Karl-Göran Mäler with the help of Jorgen Weibull and a Cambridge economist, Partha Dasgupta. Lindbeck, who was spending the spring term in Cambridge, oversaw the preparations by telephone. The dozen or so invited speakers represented two generations of leading game-theory researchers, mostly theorists and experimentalists, among them John Harsanyi, Reinhard Selten, Robert Aumann, David Kreps, Ariel Rubinstein, Al Roth, Paul Milgrom, and Eric Maskin. The topic? Rationality and Equilibrium in Strategic Interaction.

  Most of the participants took it for granted that they were performing for the benefit of the prize committee and assumed that the three graybeards in the group, Harsanyi, Selten, and Aumann, were the likely Laureates.34 Aumann, the white-bearded Israeli dean of game theory, was strutting around “as if he had already won.” Much was made of the choice of topic, which was theoretical and focused on noncooperative as opposed to cooperative games, and those who hadn’t been invited — Nash most obviously, of course.

  As it turned out, the prize committee was far from committing itself to a candidate.35 Protestations that the main motivation for the symposium was to create an opportunity for the committee “to educate itself,” as Torsten Persson of the prize committee put it later, were accurate. Only one other prize committee member besides Mäler was even there — and that was Ingemar Stahl. His brother, Ingolf, was one of the speakers, and Ingemar intimated that he had come to hear him. But everyone assumed that he was there to act as a spy for the committee.36

  • • •

  A few weeks later, Harold Kuhn, the professor of mathematics and economics at Princeton University, got an urgent fax from Stockholm. It was from Weibull, who wanted Kuhn to send a number of documents, among them Nash’s Ph.D. thesis and a RAND memorandum — “no later than mid-August please.”37 Weibull also asked Kuhn to get him á transcript of an interview with Nash conducted by Robert Leonard, the historian. Leonard, who had not taped the interview, wrote Kuhn a note in which he said that the request “sent my mind reeling in the Swedish direction.”38

  In Stockholm, meanwhile, the prize committee was about to report to the so-called Ninth Class of the academy — all the academy members in the social sciences.39 The bulk of the report, of course, was devoted to the proposed candidates for 1993, two economics historians, Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago and Douglass North of Washington University in St. Louis. But the committee also updated the class on two or three other proposals that constituted the top choices for subsequent prizes. One of them was a prize in game theory; Nash was on the short list of half a dozen candidates.40

  Nearly the only point the prize committee had agreed on was that it wanted to go ahead with a prize in game theory in 1994, the fiftieth anniversary of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s great opus.

  Lindbeck and the others were still toying with “every possible configuration” of two and three winners.41 The short list — the candidates that the committee had focused most of its attention on — had scarcely changed since the prize was first conceived.42 Apart from Nash it included Lloyd Shapley, whom Nash had known as a graduate student at Princeton. Shapley was the most direct intellectual descendant of von Neumann and Morgenstern and the clear leader of the field in the 1950s and 1960s when most of the work was in cooperative theory. Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi, who had elaborated the theory of noncooperative games, were also on it. Harsanyi’s breakthroughs permitted analysis of games of incomplete information while Selten developed a way to discriminate between reasonable and unreasonable outcomes in games. Aumann, who developed the role of common knowledge in games, was also on the list. And Thomas Schelling, who invented the notion of the strategic value of brinkmanship, was being considered because of his broad vision for the application of game theory to the social sciences.

  The prize decision is made in stages.43 Each year the committee starts meeting soon after the January 31 deadline for the two hundred or so nominations that the committee solicits from prominent economists around the world. By April, the committee decides on a particular candidate or candidates. In late August, it submits the proposal — along with a document several inches thick that includes the referee reports, publications, and other supporting material — to the Ninth Class for endorsement. The academy then votes on the candidates in early October. But, as everyone involved was well aware, the power truly resides in the committee and, until recently, in one man, Assar Lindbeck. Löfgren said, “The prize committee meets for a whole year. It’s technically impossible for the higher body to make the decision.”44

  Debate in the committee was unusually contentious from the first meeting, attended by Lindbeck, Mäler, Stahl, Persson and Lars Svenson.45 Lindbeck had come to the conclusion that the prize should be for contributions to noncooperative theory alone. These were the ideas that had proved fruitful for economics, “the most important so far,” as Lindbeck later said, adding “cooperative theory has a few interesting applications in economics, but perhaps more in political science.”46 Although Mäler sided with Lindbeck from the start, convincing the rest of the committee was harder than the latter anticipated. “It seemed self-evident afterward. But it took a long time to come to this conclusion. And to convince others.”47 Of course, he later admitted, narrowing the prize down in this way would immediately knock out some of the obvious contenders, namely Shapley and Schelling.48 And here was the real bone of contention: Focusing on noncooperative theory also meant that it would be difficult to deny Nash the prize. “Once we decided to limit the prize to noncooperative theory then it was very easy to decide who were the … [key contributors]. Then it was obvious that Nash is [part of the] Nobel.”49 Lindbeck proposed a three-way prize for the definition of equilibria in non-cooperative games: Nash, Harsanyi, and Selten.50

  This was where the debate got nasty.

  The person on the committee least intimidated by Lindbeck and best equipped intellectually to challenge him was Ingemar Stahl, a sixty-year-old professor at Lund with a joint appointment in economics and law.51 Stahl is a quick study and a brilliant debater, a man who delights in taking contrarian, often extreme positions, in any debate. He had long been one of the most active committee members and had written many of the committee’s prize proposals since the early 1980s.

  St
ahl is short, with a large head and a big belly. His detractors call him Zwergel or “little dwarf” behind his back. A onetime wunderkind who never quite lived up to his early promise, Stahl owes the prestigious chair at Lund, his academy membership, and his longtime position on the prize committee more to his political connections and his high-profile posture in public policy debates than to his research output. Like Lindbeck, Stahl began his upward climb early, while he was still in high school, as a protégé of various Social Democratic politicians, including Palme, but he had gone over to the conservative opposition in the late 1960s.

  Stahl was deeply and adamantly opposed to awarding the prize to Nash. From the start, he was highly skeptical of game theory — as indeed he is of all pure theory. He is an institutionalist, likes intuitive rather than formal reasoning, and is leery of mathematics and “technicians.” He was, for example, a main mover behind the prizes for James Buchanan in 1986 and Ronald Coase in 1991 — economists whose theories focus on the way governments and legal structures affect the workings of markets. He also prides himself on grasping Nobel politics. The more he learned about Nash, the less he liked the idea of giving Nash a prize. In particular, he considered giving the prize to Nash the kind of ill-considered gesture that was likely to result in embarrassment and, more important, make the committee look bad.

  “I knew he had been ill,” he said later. “I didn’t think many people knew about it. I guess I heard Hörmander’s version.”52

  Stahl had done quite a bit of digging. In the early fall, he had made a call to Lars Hörmander, Sweden’s most eminent mathematician and winner of the 1962 Fields Medal.53 Hörmander had just retired from the University of Lund. Stahl identified himself as a member of the Nobel Prize committee. He’d heard that Hörmander had known Nash quite well in the 1950s and 1960s, he said. The committee was thinking of giving Nash a Nobel Prize. Could Hörmander give him the lowdown on Nash?

  Hörmander was surprised. Like most other pure mathematicians, he didn’t think much of Nash’s work in game theory. And the last time Hörmander had laid eyes on Nash was in the academic year 1977–78. Hörmander had been in Princeton and he had seen Nash hanging around Fine Hall. Nash was “a ghost.” Hörmander didn’t think Nash had recognized him or had even been aware of his presence. Hörmander hadn’t even tried to speak with him. To give such a man a prize seemed to him “absurd, risky.”54

  Hörmander was precise and frank. His memories of Nash were extremely distasteful. He recalled Nash’s decision to give up his citizenship; his deportation, first from Switzerland, then from France; Nash’s bizarre behavior at the 1962 conference in Paris; the stream of anonymous cards, with their hints of envy and hostility, that came after Hörmander won the Fields in 1962.

  Stahl had also made inquiries among several psychiatrists he knew who, he says, described the illness as unlike depression or mania, where the self remains intermittently at least recognizable. “I knew this type of illness,” he said later. “I know some psychiatrists here. Some of the best head shrinkers. When I talked to them I found out that with this disease there is a complete change of personality. He is not the man who did the thing.”55

  Lindbeck, relying on reports from Weibull and Kuhn, was telling committee members that Nash was much improved, that he had, in fact, recovered his sanity.56 About this, too, Stahl was deeply skeptical. The psychiatrists he spoke to told him that schizophrenia is a chronic, unremitting, degenerative disease. “It’s a very tragic illness. It gets calmed down but actually recovering is another matter.”57

  Stahl knew that there was great sympathy for Nash. And he could see that Lindbeck had made up his mind. So he didn’t attack frontally, but simply raised question after question. “He’d throw out an argument and somebody would shoot it down,” said another member of the committee. “Then he’d shift to another argument. He tried to irritate and confuse us… to raise doubts.”58

  Stahl would say, “He’s sick… . You can’t have a person like that.”59

  He asked what would happen at the ceremony. “Would he come? Could he handle it? It’s a big show.”60

  He quoted Hörmander and others who had known Nash in the 1950s and 1960s. He read them what he considered a particularly damning quotation from a book by Martin Shubik, who had known Nash as a graduate student.

  “The most damning thing,” Stahl repeated later, was something Martin Shubik wrote in one of his books: that “you can only understand the Nash equilibrium if you have met Nash. It’s a game and it’s played alone.”61

  He brought up Nash’s work for RAND: “These guys worked with the atom bomb during the cold war. It would be a shameful thing for the prize.”62

  He brought up Nash’s lack of interest in game theory after graduate school. As Lindbeck, Jacobson, the academy’s secretary general, and others later hinted, Stahl was not the first member of a Nobel Prize committee who was motivated by deep animus toward a particular candidate or who embraced a wide range of intellectual objections in an effort to derail the candidate.63 But as the spring wore on, Stahl made a great many midnight phone calls. He seemed, Weibull later recalled, to be trying out any and all arguments against Nash’s candidacy.64

  What was certainly the case throughout those months, a member of the Swedish academy said, was a growing feeling on Stahl’s and others’ part that “a few bad choices would sink the prize. Nash was of course a very weak prize. People were afraid that the thing would blow up. A big scandal.”65 And David Warsh, a syndicated columnist in whom Stahl evidently confided, subsequently wrote, “The whole intellectual world is watching to see what the Swedish Academy of Sciences is going to do about Nash. The Swedes are known to be worried about what Nash might say.”66 Christer Kiselman, head of the mathematics class of the academy at the time and a member of the academy’s governing council, remembers talking to Stahl. He recalls that Stahl told him that Nash’s work was done too long ago and was too mathematical to warrant a prize.67 Kiselman, whose son Ola has suffered from schizophrenia since age sixteen, had a different interpretation: “[Stahl] was afraid of schizophrenia. So he had some prejudices. So he thought other people would think the same way. He was afraid of some scandal that would reflect on the committee.”68

  One by one Lindbeck knocked down Stahl’s objections.69 Lindbeck has a reputation for courage. He has never been afraid to take unpopular positions, even at the risk of alienating his political allies. In the late 1970s, for example, he had publicly opposed a favorite Social Democrat proposal to promote worker ownership of manufacturing concerns that had become trendy.70

  Now Lindbeck took the position that Stahl’s objections — that Nash was a mathematician, that Nash had stopped being interested in game theory forty years earlier, that Nash was mentally ill — were irrelevant. He too was worried that Nash would do something peculiar at the ceremony, but he was sure that could be managed. In any case, it was no basis for denying the prize to someone who was, on intellectual grounds, obviously worthy.

  Besides, he found that his emotions were involved.”71 Most Laureates were already famous and much honored. The Nobel was only a crowning glory. But in Nash’s case it was quite different. Lindbeck thought a great deal about the “misery of his life” and that Nash had been, for all intents and purposes, forgotten. Later, he was to say, “Nash was different. He had gotten no recognition and was living in real misery. We helped lift him into daylight. We resurrected him in a way. It was emotionally satisfying.”72 The only other time Lindbeck had felt similarly was when a Viennese libertarian and critic of Keynes, Friedrich von Hayek, won. “Hayek was so hated, so despised… . He’d been in a very deep depression, he told me. It was terribly satisfying to indicate his greatness.”73

  The committee listened to Stahl, but it soon became clear that he wasn’t going to win allies. The younger men, Svenson and Persson, were keen on a game-theory prize, and the older ones weren’t inclined to pick a fight with Lindbeck.

  The normal procedure when there are unre
solved disagreements is to append a formal reservation — a minority opinion — to the committee report.74 Such reservations, which are duly reported to the full academy at the voting session, are not unheard of in physics or chemistry.75 And, although they are not reported in the announcements at the time of the decision, they become part of the official record and may be made public after fifty years. Things were different in the economics committee. Lindbeck was extremely proud of its record and apparently regarded unanimity as necessary in maintaining the prize’s credibility.76

  As the report to the Ninth Class was being readied, Stahl threatened to register a formal reservation.77 In the end — whether because of pressure from Lindbeck, advice from his old friend Mäler, or simply a reluctance to go down in history as first to break the former pattern of unanimity — he did not. The Class, which is used to going along with committee proposals, endorsed the proposal.

  To Lindbeck, this was the end of the matter. He had prevailed, as he usually did. He felt, however, that extraordinary measures were necessary to make sure that everything would go smoothly once the media furor broke. He took an unprecedented step. He telephoned Kuhn in Princeton and told him that “it’s ninety-nine percent certain now” that Nash would get the prize. “The votes were unanimous,” he told Kuhn, not giving any hint of the controversy.78 He gave Kuhn permission to inform the president of Princeton University of the impending award so that the university could make arrangements. As it turns out, Kuhn had to wait until after Labor Day to pass along his exciting news.79 Harold Shapiro, president of Princeton, was away on vacation.

  For once, Lindbeck, for all his political savvy, was wrong. It was not just that Stahl, who was far angrier than Lindbeck appreciated at the time, was a powder keg waiting to explode. Rather, Lindbeck’s own long reign, and, indeed, the economics prize itself, were on shakier ground than he imagined. Powerful critics of both within the academy, including a former secretary general of the academy and a number of prominent physicists, were itching to do something. This prize had become an issue for them.