American Experience (1988) s14e12 Episode Script

1
Harold Kuhn: Mathematicians have the propensity to be
eccentric more than most people,
but there was no hint that it would
shade over into fully delusional,
psychotic behavior.
We were all aware that he had a great career
that was shattered in a few minutes.
Felix Browder: It was a very disastrous fall of
someone who was promising beyond any reasonable limit.
Herta Newman: He was so incredibly himself,
so special
and so unusual.
He was just an oddity
and there was something sweet about it.
Sylvia Nasar: The idea that someone who had been mentally ill
and impoverished
and really on the fringes of society
for decades
was being considered for a Nobel Prize,
I thought that was amazing.
John Nash: Madness can be an escape.
If things are not so good, you may be
want to imagine something better.
In madness,
I thought I was the most important person
of the world
and people like the Pope
would be just like
enemies, who would try to put me
down in some way.
Narrator: In September 1949,
the world learned that the Soviet Union
had joined the United States
as a nuclear power.
The shocking news intensified fears in the U.S.
and put a premium
on mathematicians.
Mathematicians had helped win WWII;
now there was hope they could protect
America’s strategic edge.
Narrator: Princeton University
boasted the most elite math department in the world;
each of its graduate students was handpicked.
That year,
one stood out:
a twenty-year-old from West Virginia
named John Forbes Nash.
Sylvia Nasar: These young mathematicians were all pretty cocky,
but he towered
over them in arrogance
and confidence
and also in eccentricity.
Mel Hausner: John Nash was always
an entity unto himself.
When John walked into the room
you knew that John walked into the room.
I think he thought of himself as superior,
intellectually, mathematically superior.
We thought highly of ourselves and each other,
but with John it was double.
John
was just very clearly
above it.
Narrator: Nash rarely attended class,
claiming it would blunt his originality.
He was obsessed with making a name for himself,
and was always on the hunt for problems
that had defeated other mathematicians.
John Nash: There is something of that in my
approach to mathematics.
I have
tended to think that the
thing to do is to get away from what other people are doing and
not to follow directly
in anyone's recent work.
Felix Browder: He didn't study anything.
He didn't
assimilate other people's work.
What he did
was to try to find his own way of solving
very difficult problems.
And he thought he had the talent
to fulfill these ambitions
of being the world's greatest mathematician.
Narrator: Nash soon acquired a reputation
for being both brilliant and odd.
In the quadrangle,
he rode a bicycle in figure-eights,
over and over,
and paced the hallways obsessively whistling
Bach’s Little Fugue.
Paul Samuelson: Fine Hall
is where the mathematicians met.
I went there, and I looked around.
I knew a number of the people
but I didn’t know them all,
and I thought this is the strangest group
of people in the world!
Not only was Nash not an exception to that
but I think he was quite far off the chart.
Felix Browder: He obviously irritated some people by
what I think they regarded as extremely eccentric behavior.
He was certainly not a conformist to anyone's standard.
Narrator: Even as a boy
growing up in Bluefield, West Virginia,
deep in the Appalachian Mountains,
John Nash stood out.
John Nash: I was in grade school.
I would be doing arithmetic,
and I found myself working with larger numbers
than other students would be using.
I would have several digits,
and they would have maybe
two or three digits.
Martha Nash Legg: One time one of the teachers
had said he couldn't do the math
this was like fourth grade.
And my mother laughed,
because it was,
obviously the point was he was doing it differently.
I think my parents always knew
that John was bright.
Narrator: His father, John, Sr.,
was an electrical engineer;
his mother, Virginia,
a former teacher,
tutored John at home,
and had him skip a grade in school.
John Nash: One time, somebody suggested that I was a prodigy.
Another time it was suggested that
I should be called "bug brains,"
because I had ideas,
but they were sort of buggy
or not perfectly sound.
Don Reynolds: He took his share of abuse
from certain groups.
The brain working a little bit faster than anybody else's
so everybody else
felt like they had to ridicule it a little bit.
Narrator: His senior year in high school
John won a Westinghouse scholarship,
one of only ten awarded nationally.
Three years later,
he graduated from Carnegie Institute of Technology
with a master’s degree in math.
His advisor wrote him a one-sentence recommendation:
"This man is a genius."
Sylvia Nasar: The first thing that he did at Princeton,
which wowed everyone
and made his reputation,
was he invented this game
which was known around the common room
as "Nash."
Narrator: Nash’s deceptively simple game of strategy
swept the math department.
Before long,
he applied his interest in games
to a new field of mathematics
called game theory.
Game theory
attempted to explain the dynamics of human conflict
by analyzing strategies
used in games.
Sylvia Nasar: Nash was
interested in everything in mathematics.
But what he was really interested in
were the big problems.
At that moment in time
game theory was the sexy,
glamorous field.
If you wanted to make a splash,
it was a good place to be.
Narrator: Just a year after arriving at Princeton,
he began work on an idea
that challenged the conventional thinking
in game theory.
Mel Hausner: Classical game theory
was basically two people
playing against each other, a two-person game,
in which if one person wins the other person loses.
Suppose you have many players,
game theory got into
a phase that people couldn't really deal with it.
They didn't know how to state the problem.
Harold Kuhn: If we could make a theoretical model that would answer
questions of: "Why do you bluff in poker?"
"Why would you bet when you have a low hand?"
"Why would you fail to bet if you have a high hand?"
If we could analyze things like that,
then we could handle real life problems
in economics, in business, in politics.
He had that vision.
Narrator: Nash’s insight was another deceptively simple one:
he proved that in every game
there is a best strategy for each player
given the strategies chosen by the other players.
He called it
"the equilibrium point."
In the spring of 1950,
Nash presented his elegant proof.
He was only twenty-one.
Narrator: Years later,
what became known as the "Nash equilibrium"
would revolutionize economics.
But when it was first completed,
nobody recognized its potential.
Not even Nash.
Narrator: After receiving his Ph.D.,
Nash moved to Boston
and joined the faculty of MIT.
Students called him the Kid Professor.
But he considered himself
head and shoulders above his colleagues.
Felix Browder: Basically John was a
out and out and uninhibited
and shameless elitist.
He was only interested in people
who could operate more or less on the same mental level
that he was at.
Zipporah Levinson: He was very brash,
very boastful,
very selfish,
very egocentric.
His colleagues
did not like him especially,
but they tolerated him
because his mathematics was so brilliant.
Donald Newman: I was thinking about a problem,
trying to get somewhere with it,
and I couldn't and I couldn't and I couldn't.
And I went to sleep one night and I dreamt.
I did not dream directly of the solution to that problem.
Rather, I dreamt that I met Nash
and I asked him the problem,
and he told me the answer.
When I did finally write the paper,
I gave him credit.
It was not my solution;
I could not have done it myself.
Herta Newman: He was part of this group of friends
that Donald, my husband, had.
This was a crew who were extremely competitive,
and Nash was at the top of the heap.
He was the best.
Narrator: The following year,
Nash began his first serious relationship.
Eleanor Stier
was a shy, compassionate nurse five years his senior.
Two months after they started dating,
Eleanor discovered she was pregnant.
Narrator: She gave birth to a baby boy and named him John.
Nash refused to pay for the delivery,
Wouldn’t even add his name to the birth certificate.
Unable to support her son on her own,
Eleanor was forced to place him in foster care
for much of his childhood.
John Stier: She was pretty hurt,
she was very hurt.
I think she was quite fond of my father
and things didn't happen
the way she had expected them to.
Narrator: The couple drifted apart.
Nash kept the affair a secret.
His parents and colleagues
didn’t even know he had a son.
Narrator: Not long after breaking up with Eleanor,
Nash met Alicia Larde,
a 21-year-old from El Salvador
and one of his students.
A physics major,
she was one of only sixteen women
in a class of eight hundred at MIT.
Herta Newman: She was an extremely attractive girl,
and not American.
And I somehow think that that was significant,
that she was not your ordinary college girl,
that she had also come from a very different place.
Alicia Nash: At the time, he was a little bit like the
fair-haired boy of the Math Department.
He was, I think, considered very young for his position.
And, he was very nice looking, you know.
Sylvia Nasar: When she was younger
she wanted to be another Madam Curie.
John's ambition
was one of the things that attracted Alicia to him.
She had that desire,
and she transferred it to him.
Narrator: In February 1957,
Alicia and John Nash were married in a small, private ceremony
in Washington, DC.
Martha Nash Legg: John was marrying somebody
who was intelligent,
and that he cared for. And she obviously cared for him.
Everything was great.
Narrator: Since arriving at MIT,
Nash had solved a series of imposing problems in mathematics,
ranging from algebraic geometry
to partial differential equations.
Unlike his work in game theory,
these groundbreaking proofs
dazzled the mathematical world.
Donald Newman: We would all be climbing the mountain,
the mountain being mathematical perfection.
He had a different approach.
We came up this way
and he came this way.
Narrator: In July 1958,
Fortune magazine
featured him as one of the brightest stars in mathematics.
He had just turned thirty.
Sylvia Nasar: For a mathematician
turning 30 is a lot like for a ballet dancer or an athlete.
Age is your enemy.
Narrator: By his own standards,
Nash had fallen short.
For a decade, he had pursued the Fields Medal,
mathematics highest honor;
that year,
he failed to win it again.
Paul Samuelson: He was an intensely ambitious person.
He was extremely competitive
and he was very bitter
that he didn't get it.
John Nash: At the time, I had
some recognition. I was making some progress professionally,
but I wasn't really at the top
I didn’t have
top-level recognition.
Narrator: He threw himself into solving the Riemann Hypothesis,
the Holy Grail of mathematics.
The work was mentally and physically exhausting
and ultimately proved futile.
He began to worry
that his best years were behind him.
At the same time
he learned that Alicia was pregnant.
Louis Sass: A psychotic break
is usually precipitated by
some stressful experiences.
Often these stressful experiences involve
a demand
that the person who becomes psychotic
take on greater responsibility.
Narrator: Below his brash and confident surface,
John Nash now hid another side of himself,
one filled with anxiety,
self-doubt,
even fear.
It would mark the beginning of a strange
and tragic metamorphosis.
Narrator: On New Year's Eve 1958,
the Nashes attended a costume party at the home of a colleague.
John went dressed as a baby.
He wore a diaper and spent much of the night curled up in Alicia's lap.
Even to those used to his eccentricities,
it was a disturbing scene.
A few weeks later,
Nash rushed into the common room at MI
and claimed that powers from outer space
were sending him coded messages in the New York Times.
Another incident soon followed.
He interrupted a lecture
to announce that he was on the cover of Life magazine
disguised as Pope John XXIII.
He knew this, he said,
because 23
was his favorite prime number.
Then he began noticing a curious pattern on the MIT campus:
men wearing red ties.
He was sure
they were members of a secret communist organization.
When the University of Chicago offered him a prestigious position,
Nash turned it down.
He was already scheduled, he said,
to become Emperor
of Antarctica.
Harold Kuhn: John talked about
the people from outer space who were destroying his career
and the international organizations
that were attacking him.
Somebody you’ve known for a long time,
to hear this kind of news is
very unsettling.
Alicia Nash: Truly his personality
seemed to change in a period of a week or so.
It was very fast.
Paul Samuelson: I mean, you're seeing a mind disintegrate in front of you.
I felt shocked.
Narrator: The math department chairman
thought Nash was having a nervous breakdown,
and relieved him of his teaching duties in February.
Still,
Nash continued to unravel.
One night,
he painted black spots all over the bedroom wall.
Sylvia Nasar: Alicia tried to handle it herself,
but at a certain point,
it overwhelmed her.
And when she turned to psychiatrists,
she was ultimately advised that
he should be hospitalized.
Here was this genius
and you were going to clap him into a hospital
where god knows what might happen.
I think it was very tough.
John Nash: I didn’t feel that I belonged locked up.
I never went voluntarily.
Narrator: Nash was taken to McLean Hospital,
a private psychiatric facility outside Boston
known for treating the wealthy and famous.
He was diagnosed
with paranoid schizophrenia
and given an injection of Thorazine to calm him down.
His treatment consisted of psychoanalysis;
the staff called him
"professor."
Peter Weiden: In those days,
many doctors thought schizophrenia was related to
problems in childhood,
problems in mothering.
They didn't know it was a real brain disease
and that people are born with a vulnerability to that brain disorder.
Louis Sass: Conventionally, we define it
as a severe mental illness,
characterized by hallucinations,
delusions
or peculiar forms of thinking.
For example, a schizophrenic may feel that
when he looks at you,
he may believe that it’s not himself
who’s looking out his own eyes.
Somehow, someone else is actually
having his experiences.
John Nash: A delusional state of mind
is like living a dream.
Well I knew where I was,
I was there on observation,
but I was able to think that
I was like a victim of a conspiracy.
Louis Sass: The delusions have often a cosmic quality
a feeling of ominousness.
Everything that happens around you takes on a
tremendous significance.
John Nash: In madness, I saw myself as
some sort of messenger, or having a special function.
Like the Muslim concept with Muhammad,
the messenger of Allah.
Sylvia Nasar: Someone who visited him in the hospital
asked him, how could you,
a mathematician,
someone who is committed to rationality,
how could you believe that
aliens from outer space
were communicating with you?
Nash's response was,
these ideas came to me
the same way my mathematical ideas did,
so I believed them.
Narrator: Virginia visited John at McLean,
but could hardly bear to see her son in such a state.
Martha Nash Legg: It broke her,
I guess.
It was devastating.
You can imagine that every day she would wake up
and everyday she would go to bed,
and she would have this on her.
Narrator: Alicia urged his colleagues to visit,
hoping their support would help John get back on his feet.
Zipporah Levinson: All the mathematicians were very upset,
because this was a great genius that was lost.
Donald Newman: He said,
"Newman, they are not going to let me out
until I'm normal,
but
that'll never be.
I never was."
John Nash: I began to realize that I would not be getting out of the hospital
unless
I conformed
and behaved normally.
So I, in part I would do that as if
I would be sweeping the delusions under a rug
and they were able to come out later on,
and could be triggered,
and I would move very quickly to accepting it again.
Narrator: Nash retained a lawyer,
who secured his release after fifty days of hospitalization.
Within weeks,
he resigned from MIT,
withdrew all the money from his pension fund
and announced he was leaving for Europe.
Narrator: Alicia, who had given birth while John was in McLean,
felt she had no choice but to go with him.
They left behind their newborn son
with Alicia’s mother.
In July 1959,
the Nashes arrived in Paris to find the city in turmoil.
The streets reverberated with strikes, explosions and mass demonstrations
against the nuclear arms race.
A week later,
Nash suddenly took off on his own.
He went to Luxembourg
and announced he wanted to give up his American citizenship.
He was turned away.
John Nash: I got to Geneva
and I thought of a way of being a refugee.
They had a slogan,
"city of refuge."
I envisioned a hidden world where the Communists and the anti-Communists
were really the same,
they were sort of schemers.
I had the idea that some of the people,
like Eisenhower and the Pope and the powers that be
might be unsympathetic to me.
These thoughts on the surface
are not rational,
but there could be a situation where there were –
things were not what they might seem.
Louis Sass: If to be mad is to be in error,
there’s a kind of contradiction there, isn’t there,
between what it is to be mad in the eyes of the world
and what it is to have these experiences
in which you’re having a sense of revelation
and you’re noticing
features of the world that other people seem to be too stupid
or too blind to recognize.
Felix Browder: Most of the time when he was trying to give up his citizenship,
he was being followed around
by the naval attach, who had as his commission
to get his passport back
and give it to Alicia.
And so he chased him around Europe.
Alicia Nash: I went to the American Embassy in Paris,
and I asked for help. I said, "I don’t know what to do, you know.
But I don’t want him to get into trouble."
Narrator: Nash wandered Europe for nine months before embassy officials
arranged to have him deported.
French police seized him and took him to the airport.
Nash later claimed
that he was sent back on a ship,
"in chains, like a slave."
Narrator: The Nashes moved to Princeton.
To support her family,
Alicia took a job with a research division of RCA.
She hoped that with the help of the math community,
they could start over again.
Harold Kuhn: When John moved back to Princeton,
we offered him work with no real heavy responsibilities,
just to get him back into the society.
Those efforts foundered when he refused to sign W-4 forms.
He was paranoid schizophrenic.
He wouldn't sign a document for the government
because he still thought
there was a conspiracy out there against him.
Narrator: Nash was still in the grips of his illness.
He became obsessed with unrest in the Middle East,
and made countless phone calls to friends and family
using fictitious names.
Martha Nash Legg: He would call me
would you accept a collect call from some strange name?
And I didn't
because I didn't want to validate that he was this other person.
Narrator: One day, he showed up on campus covered with scratches
and visibly terrified.
"Johann von Nassau has been a bad boy," he said.
"They’re going to come and get me now."
Less than two years after his release from McLean,
Nash was hospitalized again.
Alicia, Virginia, and his sister Martha
committed him to Trenton State Hospital,
the former New Jersey Lunatic Asylum.
Martha Nash Legg: At this point, we didn't know
whether this was going to be a very long, very expensive process.
And we had been advised
that Trenton was a good hospital.
Sylvia Nasar: McLean Hospital had been
kind of a country club.
Trenton was a crowded, open ward.
When he arrived at Trenton State Nash was assigned a number
and was mocked and told to sweep up and
it was a terrible thing.
Narrator: When his colleagues heard where Nash was,
many were outraged.
"Who's going to figure out what is wrong with a genius there?"
asked one.
"It is in the national interest,"
warned another,
"that everything possible be done to protect Nash’s exceptional mind."
Narrator: Trenton State was known for its aggressive treatments,
including insulin coma therapy,
which by 1961
had been phased out in all but a few hospitals.
Peter Weiden: Insulin coma
was developed under the mistaken notion
that schizophrenia was caused
by a metabolic problem,
by the way the body regulates glucose.
Insulin coma was one of the
more popular and unfortunately one of the more notorious treatments
in its day.
John Nash: I don't remember all the details.
It’s the sort of thing like
if you go under anesthesia
you remember only the process up to the anesthesia.
Narrator: A nurse would wake patients early in the morning
and give them an injection of insulin.
Their blood sugar would drop
and soon they would be comatose.
Some patients would suffer spontaneous seizures.
Peter Weiden: Insulin coma deliberately
puts the body into total shock.
This was done under
supervised circumstances
because if you do that too aggressively you can die.
John Nash: I remember some of the surrounding events.
There would be a group of people that
would be getting it and then afterwards,
they would go out on the grounds
and pass the time and drink sugar water.
I got to thinking of the cruelty to animals.
I became a vegetarian at the time that I was in the
Trenton Hospital.
I sort of thought that one could protest
against this sort of treatment.
Narrator: Nash endured insulin treatments
five days a week for six weeks.
His symptoms diminished
and after six months of confinement,
he was finally discharged.
No one knew what the long-term effects of his treatment
might be.
Herta Newman: He came to visit us,
and it was after this awful treatment.
And he looked like he had been battered
and
through some devastating something,
and spoke of it a little bit himself.
And it was, you know,
it was kind of heartbreaking.
Don Reynolds: He said these
treatments that he had gone through
had wiped out his early memory.
So I think what he was doing,
he was visiting me and different people
to see if he could get his
memory back.
Narrator: In 1961,
Nash was thirty-three and unemployed.
Former Princeton colleagues
secured him a research position
and he managed to publish a paper on fluid dynamics,
his first piece of work in four years.
He seemed to be better,
but inside Nash felt a sense of loss.
"Rational thought," he wrote,
"imposes a limit on a person’s relation to the cosmos."
He later called his remission periods
"interludes of enforced rationality."
John Nash: To some extent, sanity
is a form of conformity.
People are always selling the idea that
people who have mental illness are suffering.
But it's really not so simple.
I think
mental illness or madness can be an escape also.
Narrator: The following summer,
he left for Europe alone,
once again obsessed with asylum.
Before long,
friends and family began receiving letters
and postcards.
John Stier: It wasn't the type of letter you would expect to receive from a father,
how you doing or what have you been up to.
It was unbelievable how these things were supposed to mean something.
Herta Newman: They were frightening, in a way, the letters.
And they made use of all the things that had been in his life.
Mathematics was a kind of numerology
and politics mixed with paranoia.
Narrator: Distraught after three years of turmoil,
Alicia filed for divorce in December 1962.
Her complaint charged that Nash resented her for committing him
and had deserted her without support.
Narrator: Mathematicians from MIT and Princeton
found Nash an academic position in Boston.
They got him an apartment,
and arranged for him to meet weekly with a psychiatrist,
who prescribed anti-psychotic medication.
Gradually, he seemed to improve.
"He was pretty sane," recalled a colleague.
"He was a much nicer person.
The old ego stuff was gone."
He began seeing Eleanor and their son John again.
John Stier: We had gotten into a pattern of going out every Saturday.
I started to grow more fond of him
as he was around more.
And then he went
as quickly as he came.
Narrator: Less than a year after moving to Boston,
Nash stopped taking his medication
and his symptoms resurfaced.
Peter Weiden: These medicines interfere
with vitality, with drive, with thinking,
so the price that many patients had to pay
for being on these medicines
was that they felt lifeless.
Like it takes away their soul.
Martha Nash Legg: He was afraid of anything
that would alter the quality of his mind.
And as anyone doesn't want to be forced to do something they don't want to do,
that they don't choose to do.
And John had always
been very independent about
what he chose to do.
Narrator: His delusions were now joined by a chorus of voices in his head.
Louis Sass: The kinds of hallucinations that are most common in schizophrenia
are auditory hallucinations.
Of voices of a certain kind.
One kind would be two or more voices which are talking about the ongoing behavior
of the patient.
So if I were schizophrenic,
I might hear
John and Mary saying,
"Okay, so why is Louis doing that now?"
and them Mary would say to John,
"Oh, he’s just a jerk, he always does that kind of thing."
They go back and forth, but sort of a commentary,
often critical, on my
ongoing behavior.
John Nash: You're really talking to yourself
is what the voices are.
Herta Newman: He said
he understood
that there was something that went on
between people
that was alien to him.
That he was sort of enclosed in a bubble.
That he felt lonely.
Narrator: In 1970,
Alicia Nash had a change of heart.
She felt John’s repeated hospitalizations
had been a mistake.
Alicia decided to let him move back in with her
and promised never to commit him again.
Alicia Nash: I didn’t think he should just be
hospitalized in an institution and left there.
And I just felt it was
best for him to be on the outside.
Zipporah Levinson: She took him back not as her husband
but as somebody who needed help
and nobody else would have him.
Giving him shelter
and meals and protection
made a tremendous difference in his well-being.
Sylvia Nasar: If she hadn’t taken him in,
he would have wound up on the streets.
I think that Alicia saved his life.
Narrator: Princeton students
began noticing a strange sight on campus:
entire blackboards
filled with minutely written formulas and secret codes.
Rumors spread it was the work of a mysterious figure
who wore red sneakers and kept to himself.
They called him
the Phantom.
Sylvia Nasar: There were all kinds of
myths about him.
The students would tell each other
that he had gone mad
because of a too-difficult problem he tried to crack,
or after a rival beat him to the punch.
And students were aware that
the powers that be
were protecting him.
Erhan Cinlar: From time to time,
you would
see in your office
under the door
sort of a huge number of sheets
that’s been worked out the night before,
computing the probabilities of certain coincidences.
Very detailed computations.
He was into proving the existence of God.
John Nash: I felt that I might
get a divine revelation
by seeing a certain number.
A great coincidence
could be interpreted as
something, a message from heaven.
Felix Browder: I did see him several times.
He didn't recognize me.
I didn’t press the matter.
I didn't have the sense I could have any contact with him,
so I didn't try.
Narrator: Year after year,
for more than a decade,
the Phantom roamed the Princeton campus
unaware that the work he had done as a student
had finally sparked a revolution.
Beginning in the 1960s,
economists began to successfully apply game theory
to real-life situations.
Paul Samuelson: Mergers,
strikes,
collective bargaining,
these situations of
conflict and cooperation
are part of the backbone
of practical economics.
Narrator: Auctions,
farm subsidies,
monetary policy,
international trade
all were now seen as strategic games.
By the late 1970s,
game theory had become one of the foundations of modern economics.
And at the center
was the Nash equilibrium.
Sylvia Nasar: There are not more than ten ideas,
in the post-war period, which you could say
are equivalent.
It had a huge impact in economics.
It made economics
a much more useful subject.
John Nash: I knew it was good work,
but you cannot know
how much something will be appreciated in the future.
You don't have that crystal ball.
Narrator: By the 1980s,
economists expected that game theory
would be recognized with the Nobel Prize.
Year after year,
it didn’t happen.
Paul Samuelson: The committee in Stockholm
could not conceivably dream
of giving a Nobel Prize
if they couldn't include John Nash
as one of the deserving people.
Narrator: Members of the Nobel committee
worried that Nash was unstable
and wouldn’t be able to handle
the pressures of the ceremony.
Some even feared
he might do something that would embarrass the Academy
and tarnish the prize.
Narrator: Beginning sometime in the 1980s,
after three decades of struggling with mental illness,
John Nash experienced his second transformation.
John Nash: I don't really remember the chronology very well,
exactly
when I moved from one type of thinking to another.
I began
arguing with the concept of the voices.
And ultimately I began rejecting them
and deciding not to listen.
Narrator: His descent into madness had been sudden;
his reawakening was gradual,
almost imperceptible.
Louis Sass: A portion of schizophrenics,
after a long period of time,
often do seem to get better,
and how that occurs
remains a mystery.
Narrator: Slowly, he became more engaged and lucid.
Word of his remarkable recovery spread.
Those around him assumed
new antipsychotic drugs were helping,
but Nash
had stopped taking medication in 1970.
Harold Kuhn: I said,
"John,
how in the devil have you recovered?"
He said, "I willed it.
I decided I was going to think rationally."
Martha Nash Legg: He has said that he more or less put his hallucinations
aside,
like a conscious decision.
I mentioned that to somebody, and she said, well,
why didn't he do it sooner?
Sylvia Nasar: The fact that people did not abandon him,
that there were people
who treated him like a human being,
made it possible for him to re-emerge.
Herta Newman: This wonderful thing that happened to John
could only happen
in this little mathematical community
that is very, very tolerant of
certain aberrations,
and also at the same time incredibly admiring of
gift or genius.
That was what was important about Nash in that world,
not that he was ill.
NPR Radio Announcement: "Two American professors
and a German researcher
have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.
The Royal Swedish Academy cited"
(audio dissolve to) "The three winners of today’s Nobel Prize
played major roles in
bringing the principles of game theory to economics.
Princeton’s John Nash
was cited for developing what has become known as the
Nash equilibrium,
a pioneering theory"
Don Reynolds: My wife said,
"John Nash!
You don't think that's the John Nash
that we know?"
I didn't know John was still alive.
Martha Nash Legg: I remember clearly,
I heard it on the radio,
and I said,
"That's John!"
And I cried.
All I could thinks was,
"I wish my parents
could know this."
Narrator: On December 10, 1994,
at the age of sixty-six,
John Nash received the Nobel Prize in Stockholm.
King Of Sweden: "Dr. John Nash,
your analysis of equilibrium
non-cooperative games
and all your other contributions to game theory
have had a profound effect on the way economic theory
has developed
in the last two decades."
Donald Newman: I was delighted.
I was absolutely ecstatic
and so was my wife.
It was so wonderful.
Herta Newman: Jubilant.
We danced around our kitchen.
I mean, it was such a marvelous vindication.
That after all this time,
this incredible acknowledgement
it's great.
Erhan Cinlar: He shined very brightly as a young man.
Then he had his illness.
And he’s now a very pleasant,
accomplished gentleman.
It feels right somehow.
Narrator: John Nash lives in Princeton
with Alicia and their son Johnny,
who is also a mathematician
and suffers from schizophrenia.
After a long estrangement,
Nash has reconnected with his eldest son,
John Stier.
In the spring of 2001,
thirty-eight years after their divorce,
John and Alicia
remarried.
At Princeton,
Nash has returned once again
to his work in mathematics.
Louis Sass: I think it teaches us
that we have to appreciate the particular talents
of people who may be very eccentric,
and look at things in very peculiar ways.
Those are often the people
who will really have the most stunning insights.
Sylvia Nasar: Here was someone who had been lost.
I think that's the inspiration;
that people can triumph over this disease.
I think it's
incredibly inspiring.
John Nash: I'm not thinking anything crazy
but I there are different possibilities.
I don't know what the future holds exactly,
even if it's not such a long future,
for me.
Of course, the future in general is
presumably long
unless things really go bad
or unless some miracle happens.