A Beautiful Mind: The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash

Nasar, Sylvia

ISBN 10: 0743509897 ISBN 13: 9780743509893

Verlag: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

"How could you, a mathematician, believe that extraterrestrials were sending you messages?" the visitor from Harvard asked the West Virginian with the movie-star looks and Olympian manner.

Thus begins the true story of John Nash, the mathematical genius who was a legend by age thirty when he slipped into madness, and who -- thanks to the selflessness fo a beautiful woman and the loyalty of the mathematics community -- emerged after decades of ghostlike exixstence to win a Nobel Prize and world acclaim, the inspiration for a major motion picutre. Sylvia Nasar's award-winning biography is a drama about the mystery of the human mind, triumph over incredivble adversity, and the healing power of love.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

A former economics correspondent for the New York Times, Sylvia Nasar is the Knight Professor of Journalism at Columbia University. She lives in Tarrytown, New York.

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A Beautiful Mind

The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John NashBy Sylvia Nasar

Simon & Schuster Audio

Copyright © 2001 Sylvia Nasar
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780743509893

Chapter One

Bluefield

1928-45

I was taught to feel, perhaps too much
The self-sufficing power of solitude.
--WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

    AMONG JOHN NASH'S EARLIEST MEMORIES is one in which, as a child ofabout two or three, he is listening to his maternal grandmother playthe piano in the front parlor of the old Tazewell Street house, high ona breezy hill overlooking the city of Bluefield, West Virginia.

    It was in this parlor that his parents were married on September 6,1924, a Saturday, at eight in the morning to the chords of a Protestanthymn, amid basketfuls of blue hydrangeas, goldenrod, black-eyed susans,and white and gold marguerites. The thirty-two-year-old groom was talland gravely handsome. The bride, four years his junior, was a willowy,dark-eyed beauty. Her narrow, brown cut-velvet dress emphasized herslender waist and long, graceful back. She had sewn it herself, perhapshaving chosen its deep shade out of deference to her father's recentdeath. She carried a bouquet of the same old-fashioned flowers thatfilled the room, and she wore more of these blooms woven through herthick chestnut hair. The effect was brilliant rather than subdued. Thevibrant browns and golds, which would have made a woman with a lighter,more typically southern complexion look wan, embellished her richcoloring and lent her a striking and sophisticated air.

    The ceremony, conducted by ministers from Christ Episcopal Churchand Bland Street Methodist Church, was simple and brief, witnessed byfewer than a dozen family members and old friends. By eleven o'clock,the newlyweds were standing at the ornate, wrought-iron gate in frontof the rambling, white 1890s house waving their goodbyes. Then,according to an account that appeared some weeks later in theAppalachian Power Company's company newsletter, they embarked in thegroom's shiny new Dodge for an "extensive tour" through severalnorthern states.

    The romantic style of the wedding, and the venturesome honeymoon, hintedat certain qualities in the couple, no longer in the first bloom ofyouth, that set them somewhat apart from the rest of society in thissmall American town.

    John Forbes Nash, Sr., was "proper, painstaking, and very serious, avery conservative man in every respect," according to his daughterMartha Nash Legg. What saved him from dullness was a sharp, inquiringmind. A Texas native, he came from the rural gentry, teachers andfarmers, pious, frugal Puritans and Scottish Baptists who migrated westfrom New England and the Deep South. He was born in 1892 on hismaternal grandparents' plantation on the banks of the Red River innorthern Texas, the youngest of three children of Martha Smith andAlexander Quincy Nash. The first few years of his life were spent inSherman, Texas, where his paternal grandparents, both teachers, hadfounded the Sherman Institute (later the Mary Nash College for Women),a modest but progressive establishment, where the daughters of Texas'smiddle class learned deportment, the value of regular physicalexercise, and a bit of poetry and botany. His mother had been a studentand then a teacher at the college before she married the son of itsfounders. After his grandparents died, John Sr.'s parents operated thecollege until a smallpox epidemic forced them to close its doors forgood.

    His childhood, spent within the precincts of Baptist institutions ofhigher learning, was unhappy. The unhappiness stemmed largely from hisparents' marriage. Martha Nash's obituary refers to "many heavyburdens, responsibilities and disappointments, that made a severedemand on her nervous system and physical force." Her chief burden wasAlexander, a strange and unstable individual, a ne'er-do-well, adrinker and a philanderer who either abandoned his wife and threechildren soon after the college's demise or, more likely, was thrownout. When precisely Alexander left the family for good or what happenedto him after he departed is unclear, but he was in the picture longenough to earn his children's undying enmity and to instill in hisyoungest son a deep and ever-present hunger for respectability. "He wasvery concerned with appearances," his daughter Martha later said of herfather; "he wanted everything to be very proper."

    John Sr.'s mother was a highly intelligent, resourceful woman. Aftershe and her husband separated, Martha Nash supported herself and hertwo young sons and daughter on her own, working for many years as anadministrator at Baylor College, another Baptist institution for girls,in Belton, in central Texas. Obituaries refer to her "fine executiveability" and "remarkable managerial skill." According to the BaptistStandard, "She was an unusually capable woman.... She had the capacityof managing large enterprises ... a true daughter of the true Southerngentry." Devout and diligent, Martha was also described as an"efficient and devoted" mother, but her constant struggle againstpoverty, bad health, and low spirits, along with the shame of growingup in a fatherless household, left its scars on John Sr. andcontributed to the emotional reserve he later displayed toward his ownchildren.

    Surrounded by unhappiness at home, John Sr. early on found solaceand certainty in the realm of science and technology. He studiedelectrical engineering at Texas Agricultural & Mechanical, graduatingaround 1912. He enlisted in thearmy shortly after the United States entered World War I and spent mostof his wartime duty as a lieutenant in the 144th Infantry SupplyDivision in France. When he returned to Texas, he did not go back tohis previous job at General Electric, but instead tried his hand atteaching engineering students at the University of Texas. Given hisbackground and interests, he may well have hoped to pursue an academiccareer. If so, however, those hopes came to nothing. At the end of theacademic year, he agreed to take a position in Bluefield with theAppalachian Power Company (now American Electric Power), the utilitythat would employ him for the next thirty-eight years. By June, he wasliving in rented rooms in Bluefield.

    Photographs of Margaret Virginia Martin--known as Virginia--at thetime of her engagement to John Sr. show a smiling, animated woman,stylish and whippet-thin. One account called her "one of the mostcharming and cultured young ladies of the community." Outgoing andenergetic, Virginia was a freer, less rigid spirit than her quiet,reserved husband and a far more active presence in her son's life. Hervitality and forcefulness were such that, years later, her son John, bythen in his thirties and seriously ill, would dismiss a report fromhome that she had been hospitalized for a "nervous breakdown" as simplyunbelievable. He would greet the news of her death in 1969 with similarincredulity.

    Like her husband, Virginia grew up in a family that valued churchand higher education. But there the similarity ended. She was one offour surviving daughters of a popular physician, James Everett Martin,and his wife, Eva, who had moved to Bluefield from North Carolinaduring the early 1890s. The Martins were a well-to-do, prominent localfamily. Over time, they acquired a good deal of property in the town,and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2001
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0743509897
• ISBN 13: 9780743509893
• Einband: Audio CD
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar