Nasar, Sylvia

New York. 1998. June 1998. Simon & Schuster. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0684819066. Biography Of The Mathematical Genius. John Nash. 461 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Timothy Hsu. keywords: Biography Science . FROM THE PUBLISHER - A Beautiful Mind traces the meteoric rise of John Forbes Nash, Jr., from his lonely childhood in West Virginia to his student years at Princeton, where he encountered Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and a host of other mathematical luminaries. At twenty-one, the handsome, ambitious, eccentric graduate student invented what would become the most influential theory of rational human behavior in modern social science. Nash's contribution to game theory would ultimately revolutionize the field of economics. As a young professor at MIT, still in his twenties, Nash dazzled the mathematical world by solving a series of deep problems deemed ‘impossible' by other mathematicians. At thirty, Nash was poised to take his dreamed-of place in the pantheon of history's greatest mathematicians. He married an exotic and beautiful MIT physics student, Alicia Larde. They had a son. Then, Nash suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown.Nasar details Nash's harrowing descent into insanity. Although Nash and his wife were divorced in 1963, Alicia Nash continued to care for him and for their mathematically gifted son, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager. Saved from homelessness by his loyal ex-wife and protected by a handful of mathematical friends, Nash lived quietly in Princeton for many years, a dreamy, ghostlike figure who scrawled numerological messages on blackboards, all but forgotten by the outside world.His early achievements, however, fired the imagination of a new generation of scholars. At age sixty-six, twin miracles -- a spontaneous remission of his illness and the sudden decision of the Nobel Prize committee to honor his contributions to game theory -- restored the world to him. inventory #25419 ISBN: 0684819066.