Everyone knows the story of this man's life mainly thanks to the film A Beautiful Mind. However, the real brilliant mathematician John Nash was in many ways different from the character depicted on the screen by Russell Crowe. It was an amazing life of an amazing person.
John Forbes Nash was an ordinary American teenager who did not excel in any school subject, including math. His life was turned upside down by the book "Creators of Mathematics", which fell into his hands, written by the American popularizer of science Eric Temple Bell. This happened in 1942. John Nash was then 14 years old.
Equilibrium law
For a long time, mathematics remained for Nash rather a favorite pastime, rather than a vocation. After high school, he entered the Carnegie Polytechnic Institute, where he first studied chemistry, then tried to find himself in the field of international economics. But in the end, he decided that numbers, formulas and theorems attracted him most of all in the world.
In 1947 he went to continue his education at the legendary Princeton University. In his pocket was a letter of recommendation from college professor Richard Duffin: “I recommend Mr. John Nash applying to Princeton. Mr Nash is 19 and graduated from Carnegie Polytechnic in June. He is a genius of mathematics."
At Princeton, Nash became familiar with "game theory" - a mathematical method for finding the best strategy. Already in 1949, a 21-year-old student presented his dissertation to the Academic Council.
He formulated the concept of negotiation in the 1950s (mathematicians call it "Nash equilibrium") seems extremely simple. In short, it boils down to the fact that during negotiations (it does not matter, political, economic or domestic), both parties must take into account the interests of each other.
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Young John Nash
If the negotiators strive to cooperate, and not to harm each other, then in the end all the participants remain in the benefit, and the overall effectiveness of the negotiations increases significantly.
It seems to be not such a difficult idea. But when translated by Nash into the language of mathematical formulas, it was able to revolutionize the global economy. Previously, it was possible to respect the interests of the other party by referring to ethical or moral principles. Now the "Nash equilibrium" scientifically demonstrated all the inefficiency and harm of wild capitalism, when everyone tried to "drown" a competitor by any means.
The art of encryption
In the early 1950s, John Nash was hired to work freelance for the RAND Corporation, an organization that worked for the US government and US intelligence agencies on national security issues. What exactly John Nash was working on at this time is still a secret.
But, given that these were the years of the Cold War, most likely, he had to somehow come into contact with the theme of protection from the "red threat". At the same time, Nash taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
More recently, it became known that in 1955, John Nash sent several letters to the US National Security Agency.
In them, he described in detail a new approach to cryptography invented by him. Simplifying as much as possible, Nash's method boiled down to the fact that the longer the key to the cipher, the more difficult it is to break this cipher.
"The importance of this general hypothesis, if we assume it to be true, is easily seen," Nash wrote. - It means that it is quite likely that ciphers will be created that will be virtually unbreakable. As the complexity of the cipher increases, the game of breaking ciphers between skillful teams and others will become part of history."
Cryptographic techniques such as those proposed by Nash did not begin to be used until the mid-1970s.
So the mathematician was at least 20 years ahead of his time. But then, in the 1950s, the letters went to the NSA archives, were strictly classified and were not actually used.
The fact is that Nash has already managed to gain a scandalous reputation as an eccentric, prone to incomprehensible antics and living in his own strange world. In general, many scientists who are too immersed in science are famous for such features.
But for Nash, it sometimes took on very strange forms. For the same reason, RAND quickly refused to cooperate with him.
Nevertheless, in 1950 until 1959, John Nash's life, one might say, went uphill. In 1957, he married the beautiful Alicia Lard. A year later, the influential Fortune magazine called him "the rising star of the new mathematics." But it soon became clear that his problems were more than just distraction and eccentricity.
The fight with schizophrenia
In 1959, the great mathematician was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Nash was driven mad by the very cryptography he was trying to share with the NSA. He began to believe that encrypted messages from aliens periodically appear in the newspapers. And he is the only person on Earth who can decipher them. He moved further and further from reality and behaved less and less adequately.
The US legislation was then not distinguished by excessive liberalism, and therefore the mad scientist was soon placed on compulsory treatment in one of the Boston psychiatric clinics. To get out of there, he had to resort to the help of a lawyer.
Frightened and sick, John Nash left America and rushed around Europe for about a year, trying to get political asylum in several countries. However, the American government could not allow a person to emigrate who, albeit briefly, had access to classified information. Therefore, Nash was arrested in France and returned to the United States.
There the disease fell on him with renewed vigor. He talked about himself in the third person, constantly pestered his acquaintances with phone calls, during which he talked in confused and incoherently about numerology, then about international politics, then again about aliens.
In this state, he could neither work nor lead a normal family life. New courses of treatment followed, which did not give any result. As a result, Alicia, with pain in her soul, divorced her insane husband and raised their son alone. It seemed that nothing would save this brilliant mind from complete decay.
Fortunately, Nash was not abandoned by his friends. They even helped him find a job at Princeton. There, Nash received the respectfully cautious nickname Phantom from students. All day he wandered through the corridors of the university, muttering something under his breath and periodically writing the boards in the classrooms with chains of absolutely incomprehensible formulas.
But over time, the disease began to recede. By the 1980s, Nash had almost completely recovered. His wife returned to him, and hallucinations and obsessions receded.
"Now I think quite rationally, like any scientist," Nash said of himself. - I will not say that it gives me the joy that everyone who recovers from a physical illness experiences. Rational thinking limits man's ideas about his connection with the cosmos."
John Nash could have remained like this forever and remained a little-known madman, who put forward several
interesting theories, if in 1994 world recognition had not fallen upon him. The Nobel Committee awarded him a prize in economics.
For the very ideas about balance and negotiation tactics that he put forward as a very young man. Due to illness, Nash was unable to deliver the laureate's traditional lecture in Stockholm. But his authority as a mathematician from that time on became indisputable. The power of the mind was stronger than the clouding of the mind.
His amazing fate attracted the attention of Hollywood scriptwriters, and in 2001 the film A Beautiful Mind starring Russell Crowe was released. The creators of the picture tactfully bypassed many facts of unfair treatment of the scientist by the American authorities. And instead of hunting aliens, Nash was credited with spy mania.
Hallucinations, which in reality were only auditory, were portrayed in the film as visual. But, despite all these inaccuracies, the film earned a lot of positive reviews and received four Oscars and four Golden Globe awards. Nash himself, as far as we know, treated him with a restrained positive.
In 2015, John Nash was awarded the highest honor in mathematics - the Nobel Prize. The American became the only person in the world to be awarded both this and the Nobel Prize. Alas, after just a month, the life of a genius was cut short by a banal traffic accident.
Victor BANEV
