American Experience (1988–…): Season 14, Episode 14 - A Brilliant Madness - full transcript
Mathematicians have the
propensity to be eccentric
more than most people,
but there was no hint
that it would shade over
into fully delusional
psychotic behavior.
We were all aware that
he had a great career.
It was shattered
in a few minutes.
It was a very disastrous fall
of someone who was promising
beyond any reasonable limit.
He was so incredibly himself,
so special and so unusual.
He was just an oddity, and there
was something sweet about it.
The idea that someone
who had been mentally ill
and impoverished
and really on the fringes
of society for decades
was being considered
for a Nobel Prize...
I thought that was amazing.
Madness can be an escape.
If things are not so good,
you maybe want to imagine
something better.
In madness I thought I was
the most important person
of the world
and people like the Pope
would be just like enemies,
who would try to put me down
in some way.
In September 1949,
the world learned
that the Soviet Union had joined
the United States
as a nuclear power.
The shocking news intensified
fears in the U.S.
and put a premium
on mathematicians.
Mathematicians had helped win
World War II;
now there was hope
they could protect
America's strategic edge.
Princeton University boasted
the most elite math department
in the world;
each of its graduate students
was hand-picked.
That year, one stood out...
A 20-year-old from West Virginia
named John Forbes Nash.
These young mathematicians
were all pretty cocky,
but he towered over them
in arrogance and confidence
and also in eccentricity.
John Nash was always
an entity unto himself.
When John walked into the room,
you knew that
John walked into the room.
I think he thought of himself
as superior...
Intellectually,
mathematically superior.
We thought highly of ourselves
and each other,
but with John it was double.
John just was just
very clearly above it.
Nash rarely attended class,
claiming it would blunt
his originality.
He was obsessed with making
a name for himself,
and was always on the hunt
for problems that had defeated
other mathematicians.
There is something of that
in my approach to mathematics.
I have tended to think
that the thing to do
is to get away from
what other people are doing
and not to follow directly
in anyone's recent work.
He didn't study anything.
He didn't assimilate
other people's work.
What he did was to try to find
his own way of solving
very difficult problems.
And he thought he had the talent
to fulfill these ambitions
of being the world's
greatest mathematician.
Nash soon acquired a reputation
for being
both brilliant and odd.
In the quadrangle, he rode
a bicycle in figure eights
over and over,
and paced the hallways
obsessively whistling
Bach's "Little Fugue."
Fine Hall is where
the mathematicians met.
I went there
and I looked around.
I knew a number of the people
but I didn't know them all,
and I thought,
"This is the strangest group
of people in the world."
Not only was Nash not
an exception to that,
but I think he was
quite far off the chart.
He obviously irritated
some people
by what I think they regarded
as extremely eccentric behavior.
He was certainly not a
conformist to anyone's standard.
Even as a boy growing up
in Bluefield, West Virginia,
deep in the Appalachian
Mountains, John Nash stood out.
I was in grade school
and I would be doing arithmetic,
and I found myself working
with larger numbers than other
students would be using.
I would have several digits,
and they would have
maybe two or three digits.
One time one of the teachers
said he couldn't do the math...
This was like fourth grade.
And my mother laughed,
because it was...
obviously, the point was
he was doing it differently.
I think my parents always knew
that John was bright.
His father, John, Sr., was
an electrical engineer.
His mother, Virginia, a former
teacher, tutored John at home
and had him skip a grade
in school.
One time, somebody suggested
that I was a prodigy.
Another time it was suggested
that I should be called "bug
brains," because I had ideas,
but they were sort of buggy,
or not perfectly sound.
He took his share of abuse
from certain groups.
The brain working a little bit
faster than anybody else's
so everybody else felt like they
had to ridicule it a little bit.
His senior year in high school,
John won a Westinghouse
scholarship,
one of only ten
awarded nationally.
Three years later,
he graduated from Carnegie
Institute of Technology
with a master's degree in math.
His adviser wrote him
a one-sentence recommendation:
"This man is a genius."
The first thing that he did
at Princeton,
which wowed everyone
and made his reputation,
was he invented this game
which was known around
the common room as "Nash."
Nash's deceptively simple
game of strategy
swept the math department.
Before long, he applied
his interest in games
to a new field of mathematics
called "game theory."
Game theory attempted to explain
the dynamics of human conflict
by analyzing strategies
used in games.
Nash was interested
in everything in mathematics.
But what he was
really interested in
were the big problems.
At that moment in time,
game theory was
the sexy, glamorous field.
If you wanted to make a splash,
it was a good place to be.
Just a year after arriving
at Princeton,
he began work on an idea
that challenged the conventional
thinking in game theory.
Classical game theory
was basically
two people playing
against each other,
a two-person game,
in which if one person wins,
the other person loses.
Suppose you have many players;
game theory got into a phase
that people couldn't really deal
with it.
They didn't know
how to state the problem.
If we could make
a theoretical model
that would answer questions
of: Why do you bluff in poker?
Why would you bet
when you have a low hand?
Why would you fail to bet
if you have a high hand?
If we could analyze things
like that, then we could handle
real-life problems in economics,
in business, in politics.
He had that vision.
Nash's insight was another
deceptively simple one.
He proved that in every game
there is a best strategy
for each player
given the strategies chosen
by the other players.
He called it
the "equilibrium point."
In the spring of 1950, Nash
presented his elegant proof.
He was only 21.
Years later, what became known
as the Nash equilibrium
would revolutionize economics.
But when it was first completed,
nobody recognized
its potential...
Not even Nash.
After receiving his Ph.D.,
Nash moved to Boston
and joined the faculty of MIT.
Students called him
the Kid Professor.
But he considered himself
head and shoulders
above his colleagues.
Basically, John was
a out-and-out and uninhibited
and shameless elitist.
He was only interested
in people who could operate
more or less on the same
mental level that he was at.
He was very brash,
very boastful, very selfish,
very egocentric.
His colleagues did not
like him especially,
but they tolerated him
because his mathematics was
so brilliant.
I was thinking about a problem,
trying to get somewhere with it,
and I couldn't and I couldn't
and I couldn't.
And I went to sleep one night
and I dreamt.
I did not dream directly of
the solution to that problem.
Rather, I dreamt that I met Nash
and I asked him the problem,
and he told me the answer.
When I did finally write
the paper, I gave him credit.
It was not my solution;
I could not have done it myself.
He was part
of this group of friends
that Donald, my husband, had.
This was a crew who were
extremely competitive,
and Nash was
at the top of the heap.
He was the best.
The following year, Nash began
his first serious relationship.
Eleanor Stier was
a shy, compassionate nurse
five years his senior.
Two months
after they started dating,
Eleanor discovered
she was pregnant.
She gave birth to a baby boy
and named him John.
Nash refused to pay
for the delivery,
wouldn't even add his name
to the birth certificate.
Unable to support her son
on her own,
Eleanor was forced
to place him in foster care
for much of his childhood.
She was pretty hurt;
she was very hurt.
I think she was quite fond
of my father, yeah,
and things didn't happen
the way she expected them to.
The couple drifted apart.
Nash kept the affair a secret.
His parents and colleagues
didn't even know he had a son.
Not long after breaking up with
Eleanor, Nash met Alicia Larde,
a 21-year-old from El Salvador
and one of his students.
A physics major,
she was one of only 16 women
in a class of 800 at MIT.
She was an extremely attractive
girl, and not American.
And I somehow think
that that was significant,
that she was not
your ordinary college girl,
that she had also come
from a very different place.
At the time, he was a little bit
like the fair-haired boy
of the math department.
He was, I think, considered
very young for his position.
And he was very nice looking,
you know.
When she was younger, she wanted
to be another Madame Curie.
John's ambition was
one of the things
that attracted Alicia to him.
She had that desire, and
she transferred it to him.
In February 1957, Alicia
and John Nash were married
in a small private ceremony
in Washington, DC.
John was marrying somebody
who was intelligent
and that he cared for,
and she obviously cared for him.
Everything was great.
Since arriving at MIT,
Nash had solved
a series of imposing problems
in mathematics,
ranging from algebraic geometry
to partial
differential equations.
Unlike his work in game theory,
these groundbreaking proofs
dazzled the mathematical world.
We would all be
climbing the mountain,
the mountain being
mathematical perfection.
He had a different approach.
We came up this way
and he came this way.
In July 1958,
Fortune magazine featured him
as one of the brightest stars
in mathematics.
He had just turned 30.
For a mathematician,
turning 30 is a lot like for
a ballet dancer or an athlete.
Age is your enemy.
By his own standards,
Nash had fallen short.
For a decade, he had pursued
the Fields Medal,
mathematics' highest honor.
That year,
he failed to win it again.
He was an intensely
ambitious person.
He was extremely competitive
and he was very bitter
that he didn't get it.
At the time,
I had some recognition.
I was making some progress
professionally,
but I wasn't really at the top.
I didn't have
top-level recognition.
He threw himself into solving
the Riemann hypothesis,
the Holy Grail of mathematics.
The work was mentally
and physically exhausting
and ultimately proved futile.
He began to worry that
his best years were behind him.
At the same time, he learned
that Alicia was pregnant.
A psychotic break
is usually precipitated
by some stressful experiences.
Often these stressful
experiences involve
a demand that the person
who becomes psychotic
take on greater responsibility.
Below his brash
and confident surface,
John Nash now hid
another side of himself,
one filled with anxiety,
self-doubt... even fear.
It would mark the beginning
of a strange and
tragic metamorphosis.
On New Year's Eve 1958,
the Nashes attended
a costume party
at the home of a colleague.
John went dressed as a baby.
He wore a diaper
and spent much of the night
curled up in Alicia's lap.
Even to those
used to his eccentricities,
it was a disturbing scene.
A few weeks later, Nash rushed
into the common room at MIT
and claimed that powers
from outer space
were sending him coded messages
in the New York Times.
Another incident soon followed.
He interrupted a lecture
to announce that he was
on the cover of Life magazine...
Disguised as Pope John XXIII.
He knew this, he said,
because 23 was
his favorite prime number.
Then he began noticing a curious
pattern on the MIT campus:
men wearing red ties.
He was sure they were members of
a secret communist organization.
When the University of Chicago
offered him
a prestigious position,
Nash turned it down.
He was already scheduled,
he said,
to become emperor of Antarctica.
John talked about the people
from outer space
who were destroying his career
and the international
organizations
that were attacking him.
Somebody you've known
for a long time,
to hear this kind of news
is, uh, very unsettling.
Truly his personality
seemed to change
in a period of a week or so.
It was very fast.
I mean, you're seeing a mind
disintegrate in front of you.
I felt shocked.
The math department chairman
thought Nash was having
a nervous breakdown,
and relieved him of
his teaching duties in February.
Still, Nash continued
to unravel.
One night, he painted black
spots all over the bedroom wall.
Alicia tried
to handle it herself,
but at a certain point,
it overwhelmed her.
And when she turned
to the psychiatrists,
she was ultimately advised
that he should be hospitalized.
Here was this genius
and you were going to clap him
into a hospital
where God knows
what might happen.
I think it was very tough.
I didn't feel
that I belonged locked up.
I never went voluntarily.
Nash was taken
to McLean Hospital,
a private psychiatric facility
outside Boston
known for treating
the wealthy and famous.
He was diagnosed with
paranoid schizophrenia
and given an injection
of Thorazine to calm him down.
His treatment consisted
of psychoanalysis.
The staff called him
"professor."
In those days,
many doctors thought
schizophrenia was related
to problems in childhood,
problems in mothering.
They didn't know it was
a real brain disease
and that people are born
with a vulnerability
to that brain disorder.
Conventionally, we define it
as a severe mental illness
characterized by
hallucinations, delusions
or peculiar forms of thinking.
For example, a schizophrenic may
feel that when he looks at you,
he may believe
that it's not himself
who's looking out his own eyes.
Somehow, someone else is
actually having his experiences.
A delusional state of mind
is like living a dream.
Well, I knew where I was,
I was there on observation,
but I was able to think
that I was like a victim
of a conspiracy.
The delusions have
often a cosmic quality...
A feeling of ominousness.
Everything that happens
around you takes on
a tremendous significance.
In madness, I saw myself
as some sort of a messenger
having a special function...
Like the Muslim concept
with Muhammad,
the messenger of Allah.
Someone who visited him
in the hospital
asked him, "How could you,
a mathematician,
"someone who is committed
to rationality,
"how could you believe
that aliens from outer space
were communicating with you?"
Nash's response was
"These ideas came to me the same
way my mathematical ideas did,
so I believed them."
Virginia visited John at McLean,
but could hardly bear to see
her son in such a state.
It broke her, I guess.
It was devastating.
You can imagine that every day
she would wake up
and every day
she would go to bed,
and she would have this on her.
Alicia urged his colleagues
to visit,
hoping their support would help
John get back on his feet.
All the mathematicians
were very upset,
because this was
a great genius that was lost.
He said, "Newman,
"they are not going to
let me out until I'm normal,
"but that'll never be.
I never was."
I began to realize
that I would not be getting out
of the hospital
unless I conformed
and behaved normally.
So I... in part I would do that
as if I would be sweeping
the delusions under a rug
and they were able
to come out later on
and could be triggered,
and I would move very quickly
to accepting it again.
Nash retained a lawyer,
who secured his release after
50 days of hospitalization.
Within weeks,
he resigned from MIT,
withdrew all the money
from his pension fund
and announced
he was leaving for Europe.
Alicia, who had given birth
while John was in McLean,
felt she had no choice
but to go with him.
They left behind their newborn
son with Alicia's mother.
In July 1959,
the Nashes arrived in Paris
to find the city in turmoil.
The streets reverberated
with strikes, explosions
and mass demonstrations
against the nuclear arms race.
A week later, Nash suddenly
took off on his own.
He went to Luxembourg
and announced he wanted to give
up his American citizenship.
He was turned away.
I got to Geneva and I thought
of a way of being a refugee.
They had a slogan,
"city of refuge."
I envisioned a hidden world
where the communists
and the anticommunists
were even the same.
They were sort of schemers.
I had the idea
that some of the people,
like Eisenhower and the Pope
and the powers that be,
might be unsympathetic to me.
These thoughts on the surface
are not rational,
but there could be a situation
where there were...
things were not
what they might seem.
If to be mad is to be in error,
there's a kind of contradiction
there, isn't there...
Between what it is to be mad
in the eyes of the world
and what it is to have
these experiences
in which you're having
a sense of revelation
and you're noticing features
of the world that other people
seem to be too stupid
or too blind to recognize.
Most of the time
when he was trying to give up
his citizenship,
he was being followed around
by the naval attaché,
who had this commission
to get his passport back
and give it to Alicia.
And so he chased him
around Europe.
I went to the American embassy
in Paris
and I asked for help.
I said, "I don't know
what to do," you know,
"but I don't want him
to get into trouble."
Nash wandered Europe
for nine months
before embassy officials
arranged to have him deported.
French police seized him
and took him to the airport.
Nash later claimed
that he was sent back on a ship
"in chains, like a slave."
The Nashes moved to Princeton.
To support her family,
Alicia took a job
with a research division of RCA.
She hoped that with the help
of the math community,
they could start over again.
When John moved
back to Princeton,
we offered him work with
no real heavy responsibilities
just to get him back
into the society.
Those efforts foundered when
he refused to sign W-4 forms.
He just was...
he was paranoid schizophrenic.
He wouldn't sign a document
for the government
because he still thought
there was a conspiracy
out there against him.
Nash was still in the grips
of his illness.
He became obsessed with unrest
in the Middle East,
and made countless phone calls
to friends and family
using fictitious names.
He would call me.
"Would you accept a collect call
from...?" some strange name.
And I didn't, because
I didn't want to validate
that he was this other person.
One day he showed up on campus
covered with scratches
and visibly terrified.
"Johann von Nassau has been
a bad boy," he said.
"They're going to come
and get me now."
Less than two years
after his release from McLean,
Nash was hospitalized again.
Alicia, Virginia and his sister,
Martha, committed him
to Trenton State Hospital,
the former New Jersey
Lunatic Asylum.
At this point, we didn't know
whether this was going to be
a very long,
very expensive process,
and we had been advised that
Trenton was a good hospital.
McLean Hospital had been
kind of a country club.
Trenton was a crowded open ward.
When he arrived
at Trenton State,
Nash was assigned a number
and was mocked
and told to sweep up.
And it was a terrible thing.
When his colleagues heard where
Nash was, many were outraged.
"Who's going to figure out
what is wrong with a genius
there?" asked one.
"It is in the national
interest," warned another,
"that everything possible
be done
to protect Nash's
exceptional mind."
Trenton State was known
for its aggressive treatments,
including insulin coma therapy,
which by 1961 had been phased
out in all but a few hospitals.
Insulin coma was developed
under the mistaken notion
that schizophrenia was caused
by a metabolic problem,
by the way the body
regulates glucose.
Insulin coma was one
of the more popular
and, unfortunately,
one of the more notorious
treatments in its day.
I don't remember
all the details.
It's the sort of thing that...
like if you go under anesthesia,
you remember only the process
up to the anesthesia.
A nurse would wake patients
early in the morning
and give them
an injection of insulin.
Their blood sugar would drop
and soon they would be comatose.
Some patients would suffer
spontaneous seizures.
Insulin coma deliberately puts
the body into total shock.
This was done
under supervised circumstances
because if you do that too
aggressively, you can die.
I remember some
of the surrounding events.
There would be a group of people
that would be getting it
and then afterwards,
they would go out on the grounds
and pass the time
and drink sugar water.
I got to thinking
of the cruelty to animals.
I became a vegetarian
at the time that I was
in the Trenton Hospital.
I... sort of thought
that one could protest
against this sort of treatment.
Nash endured insulin treatments
five days a week for six weeks.
His symptoms diminished, and
after six months of confinement,
he was finally discharged.
No one knew
what the long-term effects
of his treatment might be.
He came to visit us, and it was
after this awful treatment.
And he looked like
he had been battered
and through some
devastating something
and spoke of it
a little bit himself,
and it was... you know,
it was kind of heartbreaking.
He said these treatments
that he had gone through
had wiped out his early memory.
So I think what he was doing,
he was visiting me
and different people
to see if he could get
his memory back.
In 1961, Nash was 33
and unemployed.
Former Princeton colleagues
secured him a research position
and he managed to publish
a paper on fluid dynamics...
His first piece of work
in four years.
He seemed to be better,
but inside, Nash felt
a sense of loss.
"Rational thought," he wrote,
"imposes a limit on a person's
relation to the cosmos."
He later called
his remission periods
"interludes of
enforced rationality."
To some extent,
sanity is a form of conformity.
People are always
selling the idea
that people who have mental
illness are suffering,
but it's really not so simple.
I think mental illness or
madness can be an escape also.
The following summer
he left for Europe alone,
once again obsessed with asylum.
Before long
friends and family began
receiving letters and postcards.
It wasn't the type of letter
you would expect to receive
from a father:
"How you doing?"
or "What have you been up to?"
It was unbelievable
how these things were
supposed to mean something.
They were frightening,
in a way, the letters.
And they made use
of all the things
that had been in his life.
Mathematics was
a kind of numerology,
and politics mixed
with paranoia.
Distraught after three years
of turmoil,
Alicia filed for divorce
in December 1962.
Her complaint charged that Nash
resented her for committing him
and had deserted her
without support.
Mathematicians
from MIT and Princeton
found Nash an academic
position in Boston.
They got him an apartment
and arranged for him to meet
weekly with a psychiatrist
who prescribed
antipsychotic medication.
Gradually he seemed to improve.
"He was pretty sane,"
recalled a colleague.
"He was a much nicer person.
The old ego stuff was gone."
He began seeing Eleanor
and their son, John, again.
We had gotten into a pattern
of going out every Saturday.
I started to grow more fond
of him as he was around more.
And then he went
as quickly as he came, so...
Less than a year
after moving to Boston,
Nash stopped taking
his medication
and his symptoms resurfaced.
These medicines interfere
with vitality,
with drive, with thinking.
So the price that many
patients had to pay
for being on these medicines
was that they felt lifeless,
like it takes away their soul.
Well, he was afraid of anything
that would alter
the quality of his mind.
And as anyone...
doesn't want to be forced
to do something
they don't want to do
or they don't choose to do,
and John had always been
very independent
about what he chose to do.
His delusions were now joined by
a chorus of voices in his head.
The kinds of hallucinations that
are most common in schizophrenia
are auditory hallucinations,
of voices of a certain kind.
One kind would be
two or more voices
which are talking about the
ongoing behavior of the patient.
So if I were schizophrenic,
I might hear, you know,
John and Mary saying,
"Okay, so... so why
is Louis doing that now?"
And Mary would say to John,
"Oh, he's just a jerk.
He always does
that kind of thing."
They go back and forth, but sort
of a commentary, often critical,
on my ongoing behavior.
You're really talking
to yourself,
is what the voices are.
He said he understood
that there was something
that went on between people
that was alien to him;
he was sort of enclosed
in a bubble;
that he felt lonely.
In 1970, Alicia Nash
had a change of heart.
She felt John's
repeated hospitalizations
had been a mistake.
Alicia decided to let him
move back in with her
and promised never
to commit him again.
I didn't think he should just be
hospitalized in an institution
and left there.
And I just felt it was best
for him to be on the outside.
She took him back
not as her husband
but as somebody who needed help
and nobody else would have him.
Giving him shelter and meals
and protection
made a tremendous difference
in his well-being.
If she hadn't taken him in,
he would have wound up
on the streets.
I think that Alicia
saved his life.
Princeton students
began noticing
a strange sight on campus:
entire blackboards filled
with minutely written formulas
and secret codes.
Rumors spread it was the work
of a mysterious figure
who wore red sneakers
and kept to himself.
They called him the Phantom.
There were all kinds
of myths about him.
The students would tell each
other that he had gone mad
because of a too-difficult
problem he tried to crack,
or after a rival
beat him to the punch.
And students were aware
that the powers that be
were protecting him.
From time to time,
you would see in your office,
you know, under the door
sort of a huge number of sheets
that's been worked out
the night before,
computing the probabilities
of certain coincidences...
Very detailed computations.
He was into proving
the existence of God.
I felt that I might get
a divine revelation
by seeing a certain number.
A great coincidence
could be interpreted
as something,
a message from heaven.
I did see him several times.
He didn't recognize me;
I didn't press the matter.
I didn't have the sense I could
have any contact with him...
so I didn't try.
Year after year,
for more than a decade,
the Phantom roamed
the Princeton campus
unaware that the work
he had done as a student
had finally sparked
a revolution.
Beginning in the 1960s,
economists began to successfully
apply game theory
to real-life situations.
Mergers, strikes,
collective bargaining...
These situations
of conflict and cooperation
are part of the backbone
of practical economics.
Auctions, farm subsidies,
monetary policy,
international trade, all were
now seen as strategic games.
By the late 1970s,
game theory had become
one of the foundations
of modern economics,
and at the center
was the Nash equilibrium.
There are not more than ten
ideas in the postwar period
which we could say
are equivalent.
It had a huge impact
in economics.
It made economics
a much more useful subject.
I knew it was good work,
but you cannot know
how much something will be
appreciated in the future.
You don't have
that crystal ball.
By the 1980s,
economists expected
that game theory would be
recognized with the Nobel Prize.
Year after year,
it didn't happen.
The committee in Stockholm
could not conceivably dream
of giving a Nobel Prize
if they couldn't include
John Nash
as one of the deserving people.
Members of the Nobel committee
worried that Nash was unstable
and wouldn't be able to handle
the pressures of the ceremony.
Some even feared
he might do something
that would embarrass the Academy
and tarnish the prize.
Beginning sometime in the 1980s,
after three decades of
struggling with mental illness,
John Nash experienced
his second transformation.
I don't really remember
the chronology very well...
Exactly when I moved from
one type of thinking to another.
I began arguing with
the concept of the voices,
and ultimately I began rejecting
them and deciding not to listen.
His descent into madness
had been sudden;
his reawakening was gradual,
almost imperceptible.
A portion of schizophrenics,
after a long period of time,
often do seem to get better,
and how that occurs
remains a mystery.
Slowly, he became
more engaged and lucid.
Word of his remarkable recovery
spread.
Those around him assumed
new antipsychotic drugs
were helping,
but Nash had stopped taking
medication in 1970.
I said, "John,
how in the devil
have you recovered?"
He said, "I willed it.
I decided I was going
to think rationally."
He has said that he more or less
put his hallucinations aside,
like a conscious decision.
I mentioned that to somebody,
and she said, "Well, why
didn't he do it sooner?"
The fact that people
did not abandon him,
that there were people who
treated him like a human being,
made it possible
for him to reemerge.
This wonderful thing
that happened to John
could only happen in this
little mathematical community
that is very, very tolerant
of certain aberrations
and also at the same time
incredibly admiring
of gift or genius.
That was what was important
about Nash in that world,
not that he was ill.
Two American professors
and a German researcher
have been awarded
the Nobel Prize in economics.
The three winners of today's
Nobel Prize played major roles
in bringing the principles
of game theory to economics.
Princeton's John Nash was cited
for developing what has become
known as the Nash equilibrium,
a pioneering theory
about the point at which
conflicts get resolved.
My wife said,
"John Nash?!
You don't think that's
the John Nash that we know."
I didn't know
John was still alive.
I remember clearly,
I heard it on the radio,
and I said, "That's John!"
and I... I cried.
All I could think was, "I wish
my parents could know this."
On December 10, 1994,
at the age of 66,
John Nash received
the Nobel Prize in Stockholm.
Dr. John Nash:
Your analysis of equilibrium
noncooperative games
and all your other contributions
to game theory
have had a profound effect
on the way economic theory
has developed
in the last two decades.
I was delighted.
I was absolutely ecstatic,
and so was my wife.
We were so...
it was so wonderful.
Jubilant.
We danced around our kitchen.
I mean, it was such
a marvelous vindication...
That after all this time,
this incredible acknowledgment,
it's great.
He shined very brightly
as a young man,
then he had his illness,
and he's now a very pleasant,
accomplished gentleman.
It feels right somehow.
John Nash lives in Princeton
with Alicia
and their son Johnny,
who is also a mathematician
and suffers from schizophrenia.
After a long estrangement,
Nash has reconnected with
his eldest son, John Stier.
In the spring of 2001,
38 years after their divorce,
John and Alicia remarried.
At Princeton, Nash
has returned once again
to his work in mathematics.
I think it teaches us
that we have to appreciate
the particular talents of people
who may be very eccentric,
and look at things
in very peculiar ways.
Those are often the people
who will really have
the most stunning insights.
Here was someone
who had been lost.
I think that's the inspiration...
That people can triumph
over this disease.
I think it's
incredibly inspiring.
I'm not thinking anything crazy,
but there are
different possibilities.
I don't know what
the future holds exactly,
even if it's not
such a long future...
for me.
Of course, the future in general
is presumably long
unless things really go bad
or unless some miracle happens.
There's more about John Nash
at American Experience Online.
Hear excerpts from an exclusive
interview with John Nash
and mental health
questions and answers
with a panel of experts.
America Online Keyword: PBS.
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propensity to be eccentric
more than most people,
but there was no hint
that it would shade over
into fully delusional
psychotic behavior.
We were all aware that
he had a great career.
It was shattered
in a few minutes.
It was a very disastrous fall
of someone who was promising
beyond any reasonable limit.
He was so incredibly himself,
so special and so unusual.
He was just an oddity, and there
was something sweet about it.
The idea that someone
who had been mentally ill
and impoverished
and really on the fringes
of society for decades
was being considered
for a Nobel Prize...
I thought that was amazing.
Madness can be an escape.
If things are not so good,
you maybe want to imagine
something better.
In madness I thought I was
the most important person
of the world
and people like the Pope
would be just like enemies,
who would try to put me down
in some way.
In September 1949,
the world learned
that the Soviet Union had joined
the United States
as a nuclear power.
The shocking news intensified
fears in the U.S.
and put a premium
on mathematicians.
Mathematicians had helped win
World War II;
now there was hope
they could protect
America's strategic edge.
Princeton University boasted
the most elite math department
in the world;
each of its graduate students
was hand-picked.
That year, one stood out...
A 20-year-old from West Virginia
named John Forbes Nash.
These young mathematicians
were all pretty cocky,
but he towered over them
in arrogance and confidence
and also in eccentricity.
John Nash was always
an entity unto himself.
When John walked into the room,
you knew that
John walked into the room.
I think he thought of himself
as superior...
Intellectually,
mathematically superior.
We thought highly of ourselves
and each other,
but with John it was double.
John just was just
very clearly above it.
Nash rarely attended class,
claiming it would blunt
his originality.
He was obsessed with making
a name for himself,
and was always on the hunt
for problems that had defeated
other mathematicians.
There is something of that
in my approach to mathematics.
I have tended to think
that the thing to do
is to get away from
what other people are doing
and not to follow directly
in anyone's recent work.
He didn't study anything.
He didn't assimilate
other people's work.
What he did was to try to find
his own way of solving
very difficult problems.
And he thought he had the talent
to fulfill these ambitions
of being the world's
greatest mathematician.
Nash soon acquired a reputation
for being
both brilliant and odd.
In the quadrangle, he rode
a bicycle in figure eights
over and over,
and paced the hallways
obsessively whistling
Bach's "Little Fugue."
Fine Hall is where
the mathematicians met.
I went there
and I looked around.
I knew a number of the people
but I didn't know them all,
and I thought,
"This is the strangest group
of people in the world."
Not only was Nash not
an exception to that,
but I think he was
quite far off the chart.
He obviously irritated
some people
by what I think they regarded
as extremely eccentric behavior.
He was certainly not a
conformist to anyone's standard.
Even as a boy growing up
in Bluefield, West Virginia,
deep in the Appalachian
Mountains, John Nash stood out.
I was in grade school
and I would be doing arithmetic,
and I found myself working
with larger numbers than other
students would be using.
I would have several digits,
and they would have
maybe two or three digits.
One time one of the teachers
said he couldn't do the math...
This was like fourth grade.
And my mother laughed,
because it was...
obviously, the point was
he was doing it differently.
I think my parents always knew
that John was bright.
His father, John, Sr., was
an electrical engineer.
His mother, Virginia, a former
teacher, tutored John at home
and had him skip a grade
in school.
One time, somebody suggested
that I was a prodigy.
Another time it was suggested
that I should be called "bug
brains," because I had ideas,
but they were sort of buggy,
or not perfectly sound.
He took his share of abuse
from certain groups.
The brain working a little bit
faster than anybody else's
so everybody else felt like they
had to ridicule it a little bit.
His senior year in high school,
John won a Westinghouse
scholarship,
one of only ten
awarded nationally.
Three years later,
he graduated from Carnegie
Institute of Technology
with a master's degree in math.
His adviser wrote him
a one-sentence recommendation:
"This man is a genius."
The first thing that he did
at Princeton,
which wowed everyone
and made his reputation,
was he invented this game
which was known around
the common room as "Nash."
Nash's deceptively simple
game of strategy
swept the math department.
Before long, he applied
his interest in games
to a new field of mathematics
called "game theory."
Game theory attempted to explain
the dynamics of human conflict
by analyzing strategies
used in games.
Nash was interested
in everything in mathematics.
But what he was
really interested in
were the big problems.
At that moment in time,
game theory was
the sexy, glamorous field.
If you wanted to make a splash,
it was a good place to be.
Just a year after arriving
at Princeton,
he began work on an idea
that challenged the conventional
thinking in game theory.
Classical game theory
was basically
two people playing
against each other,
a two-person game,
in which if one person wins,
the other person loses.
Suppose you have many players;
game theory got into a phase
that people couldn't really deal
with it.
They didn't know
how to state the problem.
If we could make
a theoretical model
that would answer questions
of: Why do you bluff in poker?
Why would you bet
when you have a low hand?
Why would you fail to bet
if you have a high hand?
If we could analyze things
like that, then we could handle
real-life problems in economics,
in business, in politics.
He had that vision.
Nash's insight was another
deceptively simple one.
He proved that in every game
there is a best strategy
for each player
given the strategies chosen
by the other players.
He called it
the "equilibrium point."
In the spring of 1950, Nash
presented his elegant proof.
He was only 21.
Years later, what became known
as the Nash equilibrium
would revolutionize economics.
But when it was first completed,
nobody recognized
its potential...
Not even Nash.
After receiving his Ph.D.,
Nash moved to Boston
and joined the faculty of MIT.
Students called him
the Kid Professor.
But he considered himself
head and shoulders
above his colleagues.
Basically, John was
a out-and-out and uninhibited
and shameless elitist.
He was only interested
in people who could operate
more or less on the same
mental level that he was at.
He was very brash,
very boastful, very selfish,
very egocentric.
His colleagues did not
like him especially,
but they tolerated him
because his mathematics was
so brilliant.
I was thinking about a problem,
trying to get somewhere with it,
and I couldn't and I couldn't
and I couldn't.
And I went to sleep one night
and I dreamt.
I did not dream directly of
the solution to that problem.
Rather, I dreamt that I met Nash
and I asked him the problem,
and he told me the answer.
When I did finally write
the paper, I gave him credit.
It was not my solution;
I could not have done it myself.
He was part
of this group of friends
that Donald, my husband, had.
This was a crew who were
extremely competitive,
and Nash was
at the top of the heap.
He was the best.
The following year, Nash began
his first serious relationship.
Eleanor Stier was
a shy, compassionate nurse
five years his senior.
Two months
after they started dating,
Eleanor discovered
she was pregnant.
She gave birth to a baby boy
and named him John.
Nash refused to pay
for the delivery,
wouldn't even add his name
to the birth certificate.
Unable to support her son
on her own,
Eleanor was forced
to place him in foster care
for much of his childhood.
She was pretty hurt;
she was very hurt.
I think she was quite fond
of my father, yeah,
and things didn't happen
the way she expected them to.
The couple drifted apart.
Nash kept the affair a secret.
His parents and colleagues
didn't even know he had a son.
Not long after breaking up with
Eleanor, Nash met Alicia Larde,
a 21-year-old from El Salvador
and one of his students.
A physics major,
she was one of only 16 women
in a class of 800 at MIT.
She was an extremely attractive
girl, and not American.
And I somehow think
that that was significant,
that she was not
your ordinary college girl,
that she had also come
from a very different place.
At the time, he was a little bit
like the fair-haired boy
of the math department.
He was, I think, considered
very young for his position.
And he was very nice looking,
you know.
When she was younger, she wanted
to be another Madame Curie.
John's ambition was
one of the things
that attracted Alicia to him.
She had that desire, and
she transferred it to him.
In February 1957, Alicia
and John Nash were married
in a small private ceremony
in Washington, DC.
John was marrying somebody
who was intelligent
and that he cared for,
and she obviously cared for him.
Everything was great.
Since arriving at MIT,
Nash had solved
a series of imposing problems
in mathematics,
ranging from algebraic geometry
to partial
differential equations.
Unlike his work in game theory,
these groundbreaking proofs
dazzled the mathematical world.
We would all be
climbing the mountain,
the mountain being
mathematical perfection.
He had a different approach.
We came up this way
and he came this way.
In July 1958,
Fortune magazine featured him
as one of the brightest stars
in mathematics.
He had just turned 30.
For a mathematician,
turning 30 is a lot like for
a ballet dancer or an athlete.
Age is your enemy.
By his own standards,
Nash had fallen short.
For a decade, he had pursued
the Fields Medal,
mathematics' highest honor.
That year,
he failed to win it again.
He was an intensely
ambitious person.
He was extremely competitive
and he was very bitter
that he didn't get it.
At the time,
I had some recognition.
I was making some progress
professionally,
but I wasn't really at the top.
I didn't have
top-level recognition.
He threw himself into solving
the Riemann hypothesis,
the Holy Grail of mathematics.
The work was mentally
and physically exhausting
and ultimately proved futile.
He began to worry that
his best years were behind him.
At the same time, he learned
that Alicia was pregnant.
A psychotic break
is usually precipitated
by some stressful experiences.
Often these stressful
experiences involve
a demand that the person
who becomes psychotic
take on greater responsibility.
Below his brash
and confident surface,
John Nash now hid
another side of himself,
one filled with anxiety,
self-doubt... even fear.
It would mark the beginning
of a strange and
tragic metamorphosis.
On New Year's Eve 1958,
the Nashes attended
a costume party
at the home of a colleague.
John went dressed as a baby.
He wore a diaper
and spent much of the night
curled up in Alicia's lap.
Even to those
used to his eccentricities,
it was a disturbing scene.
A few weeks later, Nash rushed
into the common room at MIT
and claimed that powers
from outer space
were sending him coded messages
in the New York Times.
Another incident soon followed.
He interrupted a lecture
to announce that he was
on the cover of Life magazine...
Disguised as Pope John XXIII.
He knew this, he said,
because 23 was
his favorite prime number.
Then he began noticing a curious
pattern on the MIT campus:
men wearing red ties.
He was sure they were members of
a secret communist organization.
When the University of Chicago
offered him
a prestigious position,
Nash turned it down.
He was already scheduled,
he said,
to become emperor of Antarctica.
John talked about the people
from outer space
who were destroying his career
and the international
organizations
that were attacking him.
Somebody you've known
for a long time,
to hear this kind of news
is, uh, very unsettling.
Truly his personality
seemed to change
in a period of a week or so.
It was very fast.
I mean, you're seeing a mind
disintegrate in front of you.
I felt shocked.
The math department chairman
thought Nash was having
a nervous breakdown,
and relieved him of
his teaching duties in February.
Still, Nash continued
to unravel.
One night, he painted black
spots all over the bedroom wall.
Alicia tried
to handle it herself,
but at a certain point,
it overwhelmed her.
And when she turned
to the psychiatrists,
she was ultimately advised
that he should be hospitalized.
Here was this genius
and you were going to clap him
into a hospital
where God knows
what might happen.
I think it was very tough.
I didn't feel
that I belonged locked up.
I never went voluntarily.
Nash was taken
to McLean Hospital,
a private psychiatric facility
outside Boston
known for treating
the wealthy and famous.
He was diagnosed with
paranoid schizophrenia
and given an injection
of Thorazine to calm him down.
His treatment consisted
of psychoanalysis.
The staff called him
"professor."
In those days,
many doctors thought
schizophrenia was related
to problems in childhood,
problems in mothering.
They didn't know it was
a real brain disease
and that people are born
with a vulnerability
to that brain disorder.
Conventionally, we define it
as a severe mental illness
characterized by
hallucinations, delusions
or peculiar forms of thinking.
For example, a schizophrenic may
feel that when he looks at you,
he may believe
that it's not himself
who's looking out his own eyes.
Somehow, someone else is
actually having his experiences.
A delusional state of mind
is like living a dream.
Well, I knew where I was,
I was there on observation,
but I was able to think
that I was like a victim
of a conspiracy.
The delusions have
often a cosmic quality...
A feeling of ominousness.
Everything that happens
around you takes on
a tremendous significance.
In madness, I saw myself
as some sort of a messenger
having a special function...
Like the Muslim concept
with Muhammad,
the messenger of Allah.
Someone who visited him
in the hospital
asked him, "How could you,
a mathematician,
"someone who is committed
to rationality,
"how could you believe
that aliens from outer space
were communicating with you?"
Nash's response was
"These ideas came to me the same
way my mathematical ideas did,
so I believed them."
Virginia visited John at McLean,
but could hardly bear to see
her son in such a state.
It broke her, I guess.
It was devastating.
You can imagine that every day
she would wake up
and every day
she would go to bed,
and she would have this on her.
Alicia urged his colleagues
to visit,
hoping their support would help
John get back on his feet.
All the mathematicians
were very upset,
because this was
a great genius that was lost.
He said, "Newman,
"they are not going to
let me out until I'm normal,
"but that'll never be.
I never was."
I began to realize
that I would not be getting out
of the hospital
unless I conformed
and behaved normally.
So I... in part I would do that
as if I would be sweeping
the delusions under a rug
and they were able
to come out later on
and could be triggered,
and I would move very quickly
to accepting it again.
Nash retained a lawyer,
who secured his release after
50 days of hospitalization.
Within weeks,
he resigned from MIT,
withdrew all the money
from his pension fund
and announced
he was leaving for Europe.
Alicia, who had given birth
while John was in McLean,
felt she had no choice
but to go with him.
They left behind their newborn
son with Alicia's mother.
In July 1959,
the Nashes arrived in Paris
to find the city in turmoil.
The streets reverberated
with strikes, explosions
and mass demonstrations
against the nuclear arms race.
A week later, Nash suddenly
took off on his own.
He went to Luxembourg
and announced he wanted to give
up his American citizenship.
He was turned away.
I got to Geneva and I thought
of a way of being a refugee.
They had a slogan,
"city of refuge."
I envisioned a hidden world
where the communists
and the anticommunists
were even the same.
They were sort of schemers.
I had the idea
that some of the people,
like Eisenhower and the Pope
and the powers that be,
might be unsympathetic to me.
These thoughts on the surface
are not rational,
but there could be a situation
where there were...
things were not
what they might seem.
If to be mad is to be in error,
there's a kind of contradiction
there, isn't there...
Between what it is to be mad
in the eyes of the world
and what it is to have
these experiences
in which you're having
a sense of revelation
and you're noticing features
of the world that other people
seem to be too stupid
or too blind to recognize.
Most of the time
when he was trying to give up
his citizenship,
he was being followed around
by the naval attaché,
who had this commission
to get his passport back
and give it to Alicia.
And so he chased him
around Europe.
I went to the American embassy
in Paris
and I asked for help.
I said, "I don't know
what to do," you know,
"but I don't want him
to get into trouble."
Nash wandered Europe
for nine months
before embassy officials
arranged to have him deported.
French police seized him
and took him to the airport.
Nash later claimed
that he was sent back on a ship
"in chains, like a slave."
The Nashes moved to Princeton.
To support her family,
Alicia took a job
with a research division of RCA.
She hoped that with the help
of the math community,
they could start over again.
When John moved
back to Princeton,
we offered him work with
no real heavy responsibilities
just to get him back
into the society.
Those efforts foundered when
he refused to sign W-4 forms.
He just was...
he was paranoid schizophrenic.
He wouldn't sign a document
for the government
because he still thought
there was a conspiracy
out there against him.
Nash was still in the grips
of his illness.
He became obsessed with unrest
in the Middle East,
and made countless phone calls
to friends and family
using fictitious names.
He would call me.
"Would you accept a collect call
from...?" some strange name.
And I didn't, because
I didn't want to validate
that he was this other person.
One day he showed up on campus
covered with scratches
and visibly terrified.
"Johann von Nassau has been
a bad boy," he said.
"They're going to come
and get me now."
Less than two years
after his release from McLean,
Nash was hospitalized again.
Alicia, Virginia and his sister,
Martha, committed him
to Trenton State Hospital,
the former New Jersey
Lunatic Asylum.
At this point, we didn't know
whether this was going to be
a very long,
very expensive process,
and we had been advised that
Trenton was a good hospital.
McLean Hospital had been
kind of a country club.
Trenton was a crowded open ward.
When he arrived
at Trenton State,
Nash was assigned a number
and was mocked
and told to sweep up.
And it was a terrible thing.
When his colleagues heard where
Nash was, many were outraged.
"Who's going to figure out
what is wrong with a genius
there?" asked one.
"It is in the national
interest," warned another,
"that everything possible
be done
to protect Nash's
exceptional mind."
Trenton State was known
for its aggressive treatments,
including insulin coma therapy,
which by 1961 had been phased
out in all but a few hospitals.
Insulin coma was developed
under the mistaken notion
that schizophrenia was caused
by a metabolic problem,
by the way the body
regulates glucose.
Insulin coma was one
of the more popular
and, unfortunately,
one of the more notorious
treatments in its day.
I don't remember
all the details.
It's the sort of thing that...
like if you go under anesthesia,
you remember only the process
up to the anesthesia.
A nurse would wake patients
early in the morning
and give them
an injection of insulin.
Their blood sugar would drop
and soon they would be comatose.
Some patients would suffer
spontaneous seizures.
Insulin coma deliberately puts
the body into total shock.
This was done
under supervised circumstances
because if you do that too
aggressively, you can die.
I remember some
of the surrounding events.
There would be a group of people
that would be getting it
and then afterwards,
they would go out on the grounds
and pass the time
and drink sugar water.
I got to thinking
of the cruelty to animals.
I became a vegetarian
at the time that I was
in the Trenton Hospital.
I... sort of thought
that one could protest
against this sort of treatment.
Nash endured insulin treatments
five days a week for six weeks.
His symptoms diminished, and
after six months of confinement,
he was finally discharged.
No one knew
what the long-term effects
of his treatment might be.
He came to visit us, and it was
after this awful treatment.
And he looked like
he had been battered
and through some
devastating something
and spoke of it
a little bit himself,
and it was... you know,
it was kind of heartbreaking.
He said these treatments
that he had gone through
had wiped out his early memory.
So I think what he was doing,
he was visiting me
and different people
to see if he could get
his memory back.
In 1961, Nash was 33
and unemployed.
Former Princeton colleagues
secured him a research position
and he managed to publish
a paper on fluid dynamics...
His first piece of work
in four years.
He seemed to be better,
but inside, Nash felt
a sense of loss.
"Rational thought," he wrote,
"imposes a limit on a person's
relation to the cosmos."
He later called
his remission periods
"interludes of
enforced rationality."
To some extent,
sanity is a form of conformity.
People are always
selling the idea
that people who have mental
illness are suffering,
but it's really not so simple.
I think mental illness or
madness can be an escape also.
The following summer
he left for Europe alone,
once again obsessed with asylum.
Before long
friends and family began
receiving letters and postcards.
It wasn't the type of letter
you would expect to receive
from a father:
"How you doing?"
or "What have you been up to?"
It was unbelievable
how these things were
supposed to mean something.
They were frightening,
in a way, the letters.
And they made use
of all the things
that had been in his life.
Mathematics was
a kind of numerology,
and politics mixed
with paranoia.
Distraught after three years
of turmoil,
Alicia filed for divorce
in December 1962.
Her complaint charged that Nash
resented her for committing him
and had deserted her
without support.
Mathematicians
from MIT and Princeton
found Nash an academic
position in Boston.
They got him an apartment
and arranged for him to meet
weekly with a psychiatrist
who prescribed
antipsychotic medication.
Gradually he seemed to improve.
"He was pretty sane,"
recalled a colleague.
"He was a much nicer person.
The old ego stuff was gone."
He began seeing Eleanor
and their son, John, again.
We had gotten into a pattern
of going out every Saturday.
I started to grow more fond
of him as he was around more.
And then he went
as quickly as he came, so...
Less than a year
after moving to Boston,
Nash stopped taking
his medication
and his symptoms resurfaced.
These medicines interfere
with vitality,
with drive, with thinking.
So the price that many
patients had to pay
for being on these medicines
was that they felt lifeless,
like it takes away their soul.
Well, he was afraid of anything
that would alter
the quality of his mind.
And as anyone...
doesn't want to be forced
to do something
they don't want to do
or they don't choose to do,
and John had always been
very independent
about what he chose to do.
His delusions were now joined by
a chorus of voices in his head.
The kinds of hallucinations that
are most common in schizophrenia
are auditory hallucinations,
of voices of a certain kind.
One kind would be
two or more voices
which are talking about the
ongoing behavior of the patient.
So if I were schizophrenic,
I might hear, you know,
John and Mary saying,
"Okay, so... so why
is Louis doing that now?"
And Mary would say to John,
"Oh, he's just a jerk.
He always does
that kind of thing."
They go back and forth, but sort
of a commentary, often critical,
on my ongoing behavior.
You're really talking
to yourself,
is what the voices are.
He said he understood
that there was something
that went on between people
that was alien to him;
he was sort of enclosed
in a bubble;
that he felt lonely.
In 1970, Alicia Nash
had a change of heart.
She felt John's
repeated hospitalizations
had been a mistake.
Alicia decided to let him
move back in with her
and promised never
to commit him again.
I didn't think he should just be
hospitalized in an institution
and left there.
And I just felt it was best
for him to be on the outside.
She took him back
not as her husband
but as somebody who needed help
and nobody else would have him.
Giving him shelter and meals
and protection
made a tremendous difference
in his well-being.
If she hadn't taken him in,
he would have wound up
on the streets.
I think that Alicia
saved his life.
Princeton students
began noticing
a strange sight on campus:
entire blackboards filled
with minutely written formulas
and secret codes.
Rumors spread it was the work
of a mysterious figure
who wore red sneakers
and kept to himself.
They called him the Phantom.
There were all kinds
of myths about him.
The students would tell each
other that he had gone mad
because of a too-difficult
problem he tried to crack,
or after a rival
beat him to the punch.
And students were aware
that the powers that be
were protecting him.
From time to time,
you would see in your office,
you know, under the door
sort of a huge number of sheets
that's been worked out
the night before,
computing the probabilities
of certain coincidences...
Very detailed computations.
He was into proving
the existence of God.
I felt that I might get
a divine revelation
by seeing a certain number.
A great coincidence
could be interpreted
as something,
a message from heaven.
I did see him several times.
He didn't recognize me;
I didn't press the matter.
I didn't have the sense I could
have any contact with him...
so I didn't try.
Year after year,
for more than a decade,
the Phantom roamed
the Princeton campus
unaware that the work
he had done as a student
had finally sparked
a revolution.
Beginning in the 1960s,
economists began to successfully
apply game theory
to real-life situations.
Mergers, strikes,
collective bargaining...
These situations
of conflict and cooperation
are part of the backbone
of practical economics.
Auctions, farm subsidies,
monetary policy,
international trade, all were
now seen as strategic games.
By the late 1970s,
game theory had become
one of the foundations
of modern economics,
and at the center
was the Nash equilibrium.
There are not more than ten
ideas in the postwar period
which we could say
are equivalent.
It had a huge impact
in economics.
It made economics
a much more useful subject.
I knew it was good work,
but you cannot know
how much something will be
appreciated in the future.
You don't have
that crystal ball.
By the 1980s,
economists expected
that game theory would be
recognized with the Nobel Prize.
Year after year,
it didn't happen.
The committee in Stockholm
could not conceivably dream
of giving a Nobel Prize
if they couldn't include
John Nash
as one of the deserving people.
Members of the Nobel committee
worried that Nash was unstable
and wouldn't be able to handle
the pressures of the ceremony.
Some even feared
he might do something
that would embarrass the Academy
and tarnish the prize.
Beginning sometime in the 1980s,
after three decades of
struggling with mental illness,
John Nash experienced
his second transformation.
I don't really remember
the chronology very well...
Exactly when I moved from
one type of thinking to another.
I began arguing with
the concept of the voices,
and ultimately I began rejecting
them and deciding not to listen.
His descent into madness
had been sudden;
his reawakening was gradual,
almost imperceptible.
A portion of schizophrenics,
after a long period of time,
often do seem to get better,
and how that occurs
remains a mystery.
Slowly, he became
more engaged and lucid.
Word of his remarkable recovery
spread.
Those around him assumed
new antipsychotic drugs
were helping,
but Nash had stopped taking
medication in 1970.
I said, "John,
how in the devil
have you recovered?"
He said, "I willed it.
I decided I was going
to think rationally."
He has said that he more or less
put his hallucinations aside,
like a conscious decision.
I mentioned that to somebody,
and she said, "Well, why
didn't he do it sooner?"
The fact that people
did not abandon him,
that there were people who
treated him like a human being,
made it possible
for him to reemerge.
This wonderful thing
that happened to John
could only happen in this
little mathematical community
that is very, very tolerant
of certain aberrations
and also at the same time
incredibly admiring
of gift or genius.
That was what was important
about Nash in that world,
not that he was ill.
Two American professors
and a German researcher
have been awarded
the Nobel Prize in economics.
The three winners of today's
Nobel Prize played major roles
in bringing the principles
of game theory to economics.
Princeton's John Nash was cited
for developing what has become
known as the Nash equilibrium,
a pioneering theory
about the point at which
conflicts get resolved.
My wife said,
"John Nash?!
You don't think that's
the John Nash that we know."
I didn't know
John was still alive.
I remember clearly,
I heard it on the radio,
and I said, "That's John!"
and I... I cried.
All I could think was, "I wish
my parents could know this."
On December 10, 1994,
at the age of 66,
John Nash received
the Nobel Prize in Stockholm.
Dr. John Nash:
Your analysis of equilibrium
noncooperative games
and all your other contributions
to game theory
have had a profound effect
on the way economic theory
has developed
in the last two decades.
I was delighted.
I was absolutely ecstatic,
and so was my wife.
We were so...
it was so wonderful.
Jubilant.
We danced around our kitchen.
I mean, it was such
a marvelous vindication...
That after all this time,
this incredible acknowledgment,
it's great.
He shined very brightly
as a young man,
then he had his illness,
and he's now a very pleasant,
accomplished gentleman.
It feels right somehow.
John Nash lives in Princeton
with Alicia
and their son Johnny,
who is also a mathematician
and suffers from schizophrenia.
After a long estrangement,
Nash has reconnected with
his eldest son, John Stier.
In the spring of 2001,
38 years after their divorce,
John and Alicia remarried.
At Princeton, Nash
has returned once again
to his work in mathematics.
I think it teaches us
that we have to appreciate
the particular talents of people
who may be very eccentric,
and look at things
in very peculiar ways.
Those are often the people
who will really have
the most stunning insights.
Here was someone
who had been lost.
I think that's the inspiration...
That people can triumph
over this disease.
I think it's
incredibly inspiring.
I'm not thinking anything crazy,
but there are
different possibilities.
I don't know what
the future holds exactly,
even if it's not
such a long future...
for me.
Of course, the future in general
is presumably long
unless things really go bad
or unless some miracle happens.
There's more about John Nash
at American Experience Online.
Hear excerpts from an exclusive
interview with John Nash
and mental health
questions and answers
with a panel of experts.
America Online Keyword: PBS.
To order "A Brilliant Madness"
or other titles
from American Experience
on videocassette,
call PBS Home Video
at 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
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