This book is not just for mathematicians or those in the field of hard sciences - but for anyone who wants to have some clarity on certain aspects of life itself. Sylvia Nasar manages to write about the life of John Forbes Nash, a mathematician, from his college years which began in 1948, to his years of maturity and ends the book in 1997. She tells a very important story that captures the organizational culture of math departments throughout colleges and universities across the country, homosexuality during the McCarthy era, mental illness and the recovery of mental illness, relationships and the importance of them, as well as mathematical theorems - how they developed and the use of them. This book sheds some light on why mathematicians set themselves apart from other disciplines. Her story does not only belong to Nash but to many other mathematicians whose story was similar. Read this book if you are interested in what contributes to scientist going "mad." It lends credence to the term the "zany professor."
Also, if you really pay attention, you can figure out how mathematical equations apply to everyday life...and how many decisions in the political and economic arena are not made unless the situation is applied to a mathematical equation. We are introduced to the game theory and how Nash modified the theory by introducing equilibrium points. All games do not have to end up with a winner and a loser, especially if cooperation is introduced, according to Nash.
The scientific jargon gets ever so boring as we read through several chapters on the military's dependence on academia in an effort to be competitive with Russia back in the 1950s and 1960's. The author introduces the reader to every mathematician Nash ever read about, worked with and admired. We are inundated with names and theorems that many readers will never encounter again unless a mathematician. Nasar is very wordy almost as though she has the inability to get to the point. The book is laced with trivial background information on people who were insignificant to the story Nasar is attempting to narrate.
While the book is easy to put down, it is also easy to pick up again. Something keeps drawing you to Nasar's written pages. By the time I got to the end of the first full paragraph on page 362, I wept. I wept because Nash was questioning whether it was okay for him to eat in the faculty cafeteria at Princeton....a place where he had eaten many times as an established mathematician, a place where he learned, taught others, and oftentimes held court. I wept for Nash and others like him....for the turmoil that a mental illness takes one through and how people react to those who are mentally imbalanced.
The most profound sentence in the whole book is on the front page in which Nasar quotes Nash, a mathematical genius, explaining why he thought aliens from outer space were giving him secret messages. Nash responds, "....the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously."
Read this book if you have the time. No rush.
