A Beautiful Mind (48 page)

In mid-February, Harold Kuhn, who was on a Fulbright in London with Estelle and his children, spent a few days in Paris where he visited a French mathematician, Claude Berge. Berge showed Kuhn a letter from Nash, written in four colors of ink, complaining that his career was being ruined by aliens from outer space.
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Possibly, the event that triggered Nash’s strange letter to Berge was the announcement of the winner of the 1959 Bôcher Prize, Louis Nirenberg, the Courant professor who had suggested the partial differential equation problem to Nash. Paul Cohen later recalled that Nash’s reaction was furious. He told Cohen that he deserved the prize and that the fact that an older mathematician had won it was merely a sign that these things were “political.”
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Nash also approached Neuwirth about his work. “He said he was giving this lecture on the Riemann Hypothesis,” Neuwirth recalled. “But when he started talking it was gibberish. Probability is everything!!! I knew that was crazy. I mentioned it to Newman, who brushed it off.”
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On yet another occasion, Nash wandered into Moser’s office, unannounced as always. Moser, always affable, suppressed a feeling of irritation and waved him in. Nash stood at the blackboard. He drew a set that resembled a large, wavy baked potato. He drew a couple of other smaller shapes to the right. Then he fixed a long gaze on Moser. “This,” he said, pointing to the potato, “is the universe.” Moser nodded. Moser was at that time engaged in trying to apply Nash’s implicit function theorem to certain problems in celestial mechanics. “This is the government,” Nash said, in the same tone that used to say, “This is an elliptic equation.” “This is heaven. And this is hell.”
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Ted and Lucy Martin had been in Mexico on a winter vacation. When Martin returned, Levinson took him aside and told him that Nash was having a nervous breakdown. “Tell me about it,” said Martin, who said later that he “almost didn’t believe in these things.” Martin recalled, “Levinson said, ’He’s very paranoid. If you go down to his office, he won’t want you between him and the door.’ Sure enough, when I went down to his office that Sunday night, Nash edged himself over between me and the door.”
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Strange letters began turning up in the department mail. Ruth Goodwin, the department secretary, would put them aside and show them to Martin.
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They were addressed to ambassadors of various countries. And they were from John Nash. Martin panicked. He tried to retrieve the letters, not all of which were addressed and most of which weren’t stamped, from mailboxes around the campus.

What was in the letters? None have survived, but various people recalled
hearing from Martin that Nash was forming a world government. There was a committee that consisted of Nash and various students and colleagues in the department. The letters were addressed to all the embassies in Washington, D.C. The letter said he was forming a world government. He wanted to talk to the ambassadors. Later he would talk to the heads of state.
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Martin was in a most awkward position. The faculty, after some internal dissension, had just voted on Nash’s promotion, and it was now before the president of the university’. He dithered and delayed.

Meanwhile, Adrian Albert, the chairman of the mathematics department at the University of Chicago, called Norman Levinson. What was Nash’s state of mind? he asked Levinson. Chicago had made an offer of a prestigious chair to Nash, Nash was scheduled to give a talk, and now he had received a very odd letter from Nash.
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It was a refusal of the Chicago offer. Nash had thanked Albert for his kind offer but said he would have to decline because he was scheduled to become Emperor of Antarctica. The letter, Browder recalled in 1996, also contained references to Ted Martin’s stealing Nash’s ideas. The affair came to the attention of MIT president Julius Stratton, who, upon seeing a copy of Nash’s letter, is supposed to have said, “This is a very sick man.”

The spring term began February 9. Shortly after Washington’s birthday, Eugenio Calabi, who was a member that year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, gave a seminar at MIT. Undergraduates, even very bright ones, didn’t normally attend departmental seminars, but Al Vasquez, a senior, decided he would go. He put on a sport coat and tie for the occasion. Feeling rather self-conscious, he sat a few rows from the rear and hoped that he looked less conspicuous than he felt.

He had noticed, as he sat down, that Nash was sitting in the row behind him. In the middle of Calabi’s lecture, Nash started speaking rather loudly, although he did not appear to be addressing Calabi. After a few moments, Vasquez realized that Nash was talking to him. “Vasquez, did you know that I’m on the cover of
Life
magazine?” Nash kept repeating until Vasquez turned around.
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Nash told Vasquez that his photograph had been disguised to make it look as if it were Pope John the Twenty-third. Vasquez, he said, also had his picture on a
Life
cover and it too was disguised. How did he know that the photograph, apparently of the pope, was really of himself? Two ways, he explained. First because John wasn’t the pope’s given name but a name that he had chosen. Second, because twenty-three was Nash’s “favorite prime number.”

Almost the strangest thing, Vasquez later recalled, was that Calabi kept on lecturing as if nothing untoward were happening, and the rest of the audience too ignored the interchange, although it must have been audible to everyone in the room.

•  •  •

Nash and Calabi knew each other from their graduate-school days at Princeton. Before Calabi had come up to Cambridge, Nash had telephoned him at his apartment on Einstein Drive and asked whether the Calabis could put him and Alicia up for a few days.
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He wanted to spend a few days at the institute consulting with Atle Selberg, the number theorist, and preparing a talk that he was scheduled to give at the upcoming regional math society meeting.

Calabi and the Nashes went out to dinner after Calabi’s talk. Both Nashes seemed unusually nervous, Calabi recalled. “At one point, Nash made a wrong turn and Alicia began yelling hysterically. He was somewhat anxious.”

The next day, the Nashes left for Princeton while Calabi stayed on in Cambridge. A day or two later, Calabi got a call from his wife, Giuliana, who said that Nash was behaving very strangely and would he come home?

On one occasion, Nash had walked into another apartment, used the bathroom, and walked out again. All the apartments on Einstein Drive looked virtually identical from the outside and mistakes were commonplace, but even afterward Nash didn’t seem to be aware that he had been in the wrong apartment.

On the afternoon of February 28, Nash was even more agitated. Calabi had just returned. “He was acting much more nervous than usual. Very agitated. At the moment of leaving, he was misplacing notes, running back and forth between the car and the house. Alicia was trying to calm him down.” Calabi watched, full of misgivings. Speaking of Nash’s mathematical investigation, he said, “I knew in that area that problem was not going to yield to a flash of inspiration.”
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Nash’s consultations with Selberg apparently came to naught. Selberg had merely been irritated by Nash’s persistence, as he later recalled, and told Nash, in even harsher terms, that the probabilistic approach he was pursuing had been tried before and had already been demonstrated to be fruitless.
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One can only imagine the fear and confusion that Nash felt that afternoon as he stood before the 250 or so mathematicians who came to his lecture, sponsored by the American Mathematical Society, in a Columbia University auditorium.
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Harold N. Shapiro, a professor at the Courant Institute and a number theorist who had known Nash since the summer they spent together at RAND in 1952, introduced Nash.

There was in fact an air of tremendous expectation in the hall. Regional AMS meetings were essentially job meetings. The audience consisted both of job seekers and established mathematicians, among them many who knew Nash and his work intimately. “Here was a great young mathematician with a proven ability for tackling
the most difficult problems about to announce what he felt was a likely solution to the deepest problem in all of mathematics,” recalled Shapiro. “I remember hearing that he was interested in prime numbers. Everybody’s reaction was that if Nash turns to number theory, number theorists better watch out. There was a buzz.”
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Peter Lax, a professor at the Courant Institute, described it as “a very strange adventure.”

Lipman Bers reminded me, as we were listening to Nash’s talk, that Heifetz gave his first concert at Carnegie (accompanied by the pianist Godowski). An older violinist, turning to the musician seated next to him, said, “It’s very hot in here.” “Not for the pianist,” came the answer. It must have been hot in there, but only for the number theorists in the audience. It was work in progress. I couldn’t judge it. Mathematicians don’t usually present unfinished work.
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At first, it seemed like just another one of Nash’s cryptic, disorganized performances, more free association than exposition. But halfway through, something happened. Donald Newman recalled in 1996:

One word didn’t fit in with the other. I was at Yeshiva. Rademacher, who had worked on the Riemann Hypothesis, was present. In fact, he wrote a brilliant paper on How Not to Solve the Riemann Hypothesis. It was Nash’s first downfall. Everybody knew something was wrong. He didn’t get stuck. It was his chatter. The math was just lunacy. What does this have to do with the Riemann Hypothesis? Some people didn’t catch it. People go to these meetings and sit through lectures. Then they go out in the hall, buttonhole other people, and try to figure out what they just heard. Nash’s talk wasn’t good or bad. It was horrible.
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Cathleen Morawetz, who had enjoyed joking around with Nash at Courant two years earlier, ran into Nash in the stairwell after the talk: “He was laughed out of the auditorium,” she recalled. “I felt terrible. I said something nice to him, but I was disturbed. He seemed very depressed.” (Later Cathleen used the phrase “heaping scorn on him” to describe the audience reaction.)
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Nash had been invited to give a talk at Yale as well on his way back to Cambridge. It was his second talk at Yale that year, but he couldn’t find his way there. He kept calling Felix Browder, then teaching at Yale, and telling him that he couldn’t understand how to get off the Merritt Parkway.

Nash talked about the Riemann Hypothesis just as he had at Columbia. Again, it was a disastrous performance, as recalled by Browder, who contrasted his
performance with the earlier one. “The preceding year there was no hint of trouble. That is when he finished the parabolic equations proof. [In fact] he completed the proof during a talk. I [had] asked him if he wanted to come and give another talk at Yale. It wasn’t coherent. I thought something was wrong.”
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35
In the Eye of the Storm
Spring 1959

It was like a tornado. You want to hang on to what you have. You don’t want to see everything go.

— A
LICIA
N
ASH

D
ESPITE
A
LICIA’S
apparent elation on New Year’s Eve, her state of mind in the preceding months had been anything but carefree. Since returning from their European holiday, her starry-eyed view of her new life had given way to a darker, more somber perspective. She and Nash had moved out to West Medford, a small industrial city north of Cambridge, and Alicia felt cut off and isolated. Her goal of establishing a career seemed more distant than ever. Her feelings about her pregnancy were ambivalent, and her initial hopes that it would draw her and Nash closer were disappointed. Her husband had become, if anything, more cold and distant. As the weather turned colder and the days shorter, she felt more and more dispirited, anxious, and alone — so much so that she was thinking of consulting a psychiatrist.
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That had been before Thanksgiving. Since then, Nash’s behavior, rather than her own low mood, had become her chief source of distress. Several times, Nash had cornered her with odd questions when they were alone, either at home or driving in the car. “Why don’t you tell me about it?” he asked in an angry, agitated tone, apropos of nothing. “Tell me what you know,” he demanded.
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He behaved as if she knew some secret but wouldn’t share it with him. The first time he said it, Alicia thought Nash suspected her of having an affair. When he repeated it, she wondered whether he might not be having an affair himself. That would account for his growing secretiveness and air of abstraction. Might he not be trying to deflect attention from himself by accusing her?

By New Year’s Day, the day she turned twenty-six, Alicia was sure that “something was wrong.”
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Nash’s behavior had become more and more peculiar. He was irritable and hypersensitive one minute, eerily withdrawn the next. He complained that he “knew something was going on” and that he was being “bugged.” And he was staying up nights writing strange letters to the United Nations. One night, after
he had painted black spots all over their bedroom wall, Alicia made him sleep on the living-room couch.
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Alarmed, Alicia searched for explanations rooted in their day-to-day life. Her first thought was that Nash was unduly worried about the impending tenure decision. She suspected that the prospect of a baby, with all the new responsibilities that implied, was another source of pressure. And she wondered whether marriage to someone “different” like her wasn’t proving too much of a strain for a southern WASP.
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