Lost and found

A Beautiful Mind. By Sylvia Nasar. Simon & Schuster/Faber and Faber; 459 pages; £17.99

THE story of John Forbes Nash, who won the Nobel prize for economics in 1994, is unusual, if not astonishing. As a graduate student in 1949, Mr Nash undertook an analysis of competition that became one of the pillars of game theory. But more than 30 lost years lay between this honour and the time when the work it honoured was done. The brilliant mathematician of the 1940s and 1950s was destroyed by schizophrenia, and re-emerged only in old age, after an almost unprecedented recovery.

There is something familiar about the outward shape of his journey—glorious rise, disastrous fall, and finally recovery. But the extremes it visits along the way, from the outer reaches of intellectual abstraction to the depths of a terrifying illness, make it unique and barely comprehensible. Treating a life as disjointed as this in a linear fashion means that Ms Nasar's fascinating book has several quite distinct sections with different appeals. The first half, covering the emergence of Mr Nash's versatile brilliance, is as interesting for its setting and supporting characters as for its unappealing central figure. Mr Nash's oddities seemed then merely an extreme form of the adolescent tomfoolery displayed by many a precocious, awkward scientific whizz-kid.

The 1950s in America were rigid and repressive, but they were also times of tremendous exploration and optimism. Princeton, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the RAND corporation, where the young Mr Nash developed his talents, exemplified plenty of the conservatism of the era, but they also led the intellectual charge into the future. Ms Nasar's account vividly evokes these times and places, based as it is on numerous interviews with senior academics who were once competitive youngsters, testing each other's wits in the common room with games of Kriegspiel (a version of chess in which you do not know where your opponent's pieces are).

The book is often moving. The story of Alicia Larde, whose family fled El Salvador for Louisiana and who was later to marry Mr Nash, is itself a wonderful American tale of the triumph of an intelligent woman in a very male world. The focus on Mr Nash tightens after his arrest for homosexuality and the loss of his job at RAND. In the four years that followed, eccentricity tipped over into insanity; research into prime numbers veered off into a paranoid conviction that numbers held hidden religious and political meaning. Even those unable to grasp the Riemann hypothesis—the mathematical problem in which Mr Nash was enmeshed when he went mad—feel certain that it is of a different nature to sums like “Mao Tse-Tung's barmitzvah was 13 years, 13 months, and 13 days after Brezhnev's circumcision.” Yet for Mr Nash, who wrote many such messages on blackboards around Princeton, there was a continuity. Such ideas as his belief that aliens from outer space were ordering him to save the world via messages encoded on the front page of the New York Times came to him, Mr Nash said, the same way that his mathematical ideas had, “so took them seriously.”

Ms Nasar, not surprisingly, does not explain the mystery of this link between genius and madness. Equally mysterious is the gradual remission of Mr Nash's illness. The academic community treated him with humane tolerance, which helped. And Mr Nash returned, after many spells in asylums, to live with his former wife in Princeton, where he was free to roam the libraries. When his numerology led him to seek the meanings hidden in names by converting them into numbers in base 26 and deriving prime factors, sympathetic dons gave him computer time to speed up the complex calculations. This process seems to have gently guided Mr Nash back to the cool clarity of mathematical structure. And Ms Nasar reviews his life with equal sympathy.