Resumo de A Beautiful Mind

John Forbes Nash, Jr., was born as the first son to Margaret Virginia Martin and John Forbes Nash, Sr., in 1928 in a town called Bluefield. As a child, he was inquisitive, but rather socially awkward. He often relied on his younger sister, Martha Nash, to find him friends.
In 1945, John Nash won the George Westinghouse full scholarship and joined the Carnegie Institute of Technology to become a chemical engineer. However, he soon left engineering to pursue his increasing interest in mathematics. He participated in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition in his freshman and sophomore year. He made it to the top ten in the sophomore year, but was very disappointed with his performance. By his junior year, Harvard, Princeton, Chicago and Michigan graduate programs for mathematics had accepted him.
Nash joined Princeton in 1948, as they offered a more generous fellowship than Harvard, which had a better reputation. Even here, Nash remained somewhat different from the rest of the students. He was often termed as childish, odd or eccentric. His manner of thinking was original, and he rarely studied from books believing that this would stifle his creativity. He enjoyed playing games like Chess and Kriegspiel and was often found doing so in the Fine Hall, the mathematics building of Princeton. Eventually, he invented his own game that was called ?John? or ?Nash,? and became instantly popular at Princeton. In his second year at Princeton, Nash wrote a paper on ?The Bargaining Problem,? which initiated his interest in the Game Theory. In 1949, Nash came up with a thesis he called the Nash Equilibrium, which was to win him a Nobel Prize years later.
In 1950, Nash joined RAND, a research venture working in association with the Air force, which entailed the services of mathematicians and scientists. Here, he further developed the game theory by working on non-cooperative games.
When North Korea invaded South Korea in 1950, Nash feared being drafted as it would interrupt his research. He took the assistance of Princeton and RAND to prove that he would be more valuable as a researcher in America rather than a soldier fighting in Korea. This fear of being drafted haunted him in his later years, when he suffered from schizophrenia.
In the year 1950-51, Nash wrote a paper on algebraic manifolds. Though he expected an offer from the Princeton maths department, he was rejected due to his personality. MIT and Chicago wished to hire Nash as an instructor. Nash chose MIT, where he taught for 7 years. It was here that he solved the embedding problem for manifolds.
Nash was infatuated with men several times throughout his career. However, by 1952, Nash was involved in a relationship with Eleanor. In 1953, she gave birth to John David Stier, Nash?s first son. However, Nash refused to marry or live with Eleanor. This resulted in a lot of friction between the two; nonetheless, the affair continued until Nash suggested his son be put up for adoption. Simultaneously, Nash was also involved with a mathematician named Bricker at MIT.
By 1957, Nash was married to Alicia Larde, who was one of the few co-eds at MIT around 1954.
Nash worked on a very difficult problem in partial differential equations, and managed to solve it, but was terribly disappointed to discover that an Italian named De Giorgi had invented part of it. He feared a co-inventor would lessen his chances of getting the coveted Fields Medal. He also attempted to solve the Riemann?s Hypothesis.
By 1959, Alicia had given birth to a son, Johnny. By now, John Nash was slowly but steadily becoming mentally ill. He started acting oddly and would insist that he was someone trying to save the planet. He began believing that aliens were sending secret messages to him in the newspaper that only he could decode and understand. He started writing strange letters to the United Nations, various foreign ambassadors, the Pope and FBI. He insisted on world government, and even tried to denounce his American citizenship in Switzerland. Alicia had him hospitalised to various mental hospitals like McLean, Trenton State and Carrier hospitals where he was treated for schizophrenia. For 30 years, he remained ill. At times, he would be almost normal, but then would have a relapse of his delusions. He worked in the Fine Hall intermittently during his stable periods. It was during this time that Alicia and Nash had a divorce. Despite this, they continued to live together, and Alicia continued to take care of him. Nash spent 1970 to 1990 in Princeton, roaming in the corridors of Fine Hall leaving strange messages on various boards. The inmates of Fine Hall would call him the ?Phantom?.
After 1990, John Nash gradually and dramatically recovered. On October 12, 1994, after much discussion and dispute amongst the members of the Royal Swedish Academy, John Forbes Nash won a Nobel Prize in Economics for his contributions to game theory, by a handful of votes. He shared this prize with two other game theorists: Harsanyi and Selten. His elder son pursued a career in nursing, while his younger son, Johnny, suffers from schizophrenia. Nash considers Johnny as his responsibility and takes care of him. John Nash remarried Alicia at the age of 73, and they continue to live at Princeton Junction, New Jersey.

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