Later, he begins a romance with Alicia Larde, another MIT student, though he conceals his relationship with Eleanor from her. Nash also has a torrid affair with Jack Bricker, a gifted young graduate student at MIT. In Cambridge, Nash meets and dates Eleanor Stier, a nurse, who becomes pregnant and gives birth to their son, John David Stier. Nash later becomes an instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is nicknamed “the Kid Professor”: his eccentricity and arrogance earn him both the respect and ire of his students and colleagues. He is eventually arrested for lewd (and likely homosexual) conduct during a police sting in Santa Monica, where he is employed as a summer research analyst for RAND, a Navy-sponsored think tank specializing in military strategy. Throughout his life, Nash is attracted to a number of young men, many of them mathematicians, though these affairs are usually fleeting.

Intensely independent and self-assured since childhood, Nash can be awkward or even downright cruel in his interactions with others, and he often regards his relationships with his peers as “games,” applying his own research to his social life. This is the “ Nash equilibrium,” which attempts to describe how two players or individuals in a game or conflict might interact, given that individuals do not always make decisions out of self-interest, but often cooperate, acting in ways that take their opponents’ decisions into account.ĭespite Nash’s clear genius and propensity for innovative thinking-which sets him apart from other Princeton graduate students and allows him to make groundbreaking discoveries-Nash is also deeply troubled. It is at Princeton that Nash develops his most famous contribution to game theory-a mathematical field that studies interactions, decisions, and strategy among rational actors, with applications to many social sciences-which served as the basis of his graduate dissertation. Nash’s talents as a mathematician are discovered and encouraged by his professors at the Carnegie Institute, and he goes on to attend the PhD program in math at Princeton University. She follows his story to Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he attends college at the height of World War II. Nasar tracks Nash’s humble beginnings in Bluefield, West Virginia, where he was a bookish child whose eccentricity made him a social outcast. Intrigued, Nasar decides to pursue the story of Nash, who was a rising star in the field of game theory-an area of mathematics with applications to economics and human behavior-before he began experiencing psychotic episodes in his early 30s. Sylvia Nasar, an economics journalist working for the New York Times, first hears about the story of John Nash, an acclaimed mathematician whose career was derailed by schizophrenia, from a Princeton University professor whom she is interviewing for an article.

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar