Currently reading "A Beautiful Mind" by Sylvia Nasar, a biography on John Nash: mathematician, Nobel Prize winner for his pioneering work on game theory, and schizophrenic.
I love biographies. They read like creative fiction, without the ensuing guilt trip of consuming too much frivolous fluff. Catering to our natural superficiality, biographical authors typically go all out in vivid, exaggerated descriptions of their real-life characters. Sylvia Nasar does not disappoint. If the world was as described as in "A Beautiful Mind", Princeton University's math department in the 1950's would have been a godly haven of brilliant Adonises, their stunning good looks matched only by their ridiculously high intellect. Should I devote my life to inventing a time machine or are Ms. Nasar's depictions overly embellished? Let's investigate!
1. John Forbes Nash, Jr.
"Six foot one, he weighed nearly 170 pounds. He had broad shoulders, a heavily muscled chest, and a tapered waist. He had the build, if not the bearing, of an athlete, "a very strong, very masculine body," one fellow graduate student recalled. He was, moreover, "handsome as a god," according to another student. His high forehead, somewhat protruding ears, distinctive nose, fleshy lips, and small chin gave him the look of an English aristocrat...He wore his fingernails very long, which drew attention to his rather limp and beautiful hands and long, delicate fingers...His speech had an Olympian and ornamental quality..." (pg. 62)
"Handsome as a god"? Yes, please. Let's see a picture:
Not exactly how I imagined gods to look like, but hey, I'm picky. Sylvia Nasar clearly needs a new editor: Nash's ears are not slightly protruding. They are protruding. Eh, I can't fault Nasar for the description much though: most of those overly flattering descriptions are from his own classmates. To each his own, I suppose!
In an effort to keep this post a tad (tad) bit intellectual, here are some interesting tidbits about Nash you might not have known:
- Nash never won the Putnam or made it to the top five. This would bother him for life: he believes this lack of recognition caused Harvard, his top choice for graduate school, to insufficiently value him, and to this day continues to identify mathematicians by the frequency of times they won the Putnam.
- Princeton, where Nash ended up attending, became the prominent location for mathematics in the United States virtually overnight. Prior to the 1940's, mathematics and physics were overlooked in the U.S.: famous physicist Willard Gibbs was refused a salary for seven years by Yale on the grounds that his studies were "irrelevant" and American students had to go to Europe for any advanced mathematical schooling. The sponsorship by the Rockefeller Foundation and $25 million fortune from New Jersey department store owners created a fat balance, allowing Princeton to bring a slew of famous mathematicians, including Albert Einstein.
- At Princeton, Nash and fellow graduate mathematicians received "a maximum of pressure but a wonderful minimum of bureaucracy." Grades were completely arbitrary, there were no course requirements, and classes could be skipped without punishment; however, if the faculty decided an individual couldn't make the cut, he could be quickly dropped from the school.
- "Nash appeared to be interested in almost everything mathematical...Yet he avoided attending classes. No one recalls sitting in a regular class with him...Nobody remembers seeing Nash with a book during his graduate career either...Nash's main mode of picking up information he deemed necessary consisted of quizzing various faculty members and fellow students." (pg. 68)
- Why didn't he like reading books, you might ask? He thought that learning too much secondhand would stifle creativity and originality; "He was obsessed with learning from scratch."
Next, we have Emil Artin, Professor at Princeton and a critic of young Nash: he found Nash "irritatingly brash" and "shockingly ignorant". Artin was apparently one of the leading algebraists of the century. According to Ms. Nasar, he was also "slender, handsome, with ice-blue eyes and a spellbinding voice." Oh, and he looked "like a 1920s German matinee idol" with a "gaunt, elegant body." Hmm. Picture?
Ms. Nasar is proven wrong again: his eyes are not ice-blue, but in fact a sort of brownish gray, or, more accurately, a sort of grayish brown. Clearly, he is suffering acutely from some strange malady, as his skin, lips, and hair have also attained that curious color.
We must proceed. Time machines take a lifetime to create, after all. We lastly have John Milnor, a dazzlingly brilliant young mathematician. Winner of the Putnam Prize three times, he was one of the select few that Nash viewed highly enough to engage in conversation with. Not only that, he was, in the words of Ms. Nasar, "tall, lithe, with a baby face and the body of a gymnast"; "the department's golden boy." (pg. 72)
Let's see how he fares!:
I really cannot, for the life of me, recall babies having so much facial hair. Admittedly, my memory is remarkably bad. As for Milnor: one eye seems to be looking at me, and the other past me, and the effect is quite unsettling.
All in all, I have to say, after graduating with a slew of modern Harvard men, the old-fashioned Princeton ones are good eye candy. If not for their dreary pallor (gray was clearly "in"), I'd be raring to do some time travelling, asap!
