A beautiful book !. Review on A Beautiful Mind - Sylvia Nasar

?A beautiful mind ? written by Sylvia Naser is an excellent account of human grit and gumption and is a celebration of undaunting human spirit. The book is a sign of hope for the ?faithful(s)? ?for those who still believe in rationality, who still get high on abstracts and search for the meaning of everything by delving deep in to uncharted territories.

It?s a tribute to those great souls who have shaped the world to be as it is today through their single-minded pursuits and a steely determination to find out the unknowns.

John Nash Jr. is one of those souls.

The book is a biography of Mr. Nash and the title of the book is credited to one of Nash?s long time friend Mr. Shapley, another mathematician. Nash is one of the best minds of the last century ?a genius. And reading through the book one gets an impression of a genius in its most raw form. The book takes one through the life story of Nash since his childhood and touches almost all the aspects of his life with rare neutrality.

Nash was born in a ?blue blooded ? family .His father was an electrical engineer and mother a teacher. Nash was not a child prodigy and wanted to become an electrical engineer like a father but as the destiny would want it-he discovered his taste for math just in time to chose the right academic courses.

Nash was a born puzzle solver and had a knack for taking on the challenge and prove his intelligence. He was aware of his talent and was very proud of it. He had extremely high self-confidence that led him once up to the office of Einstein where after listening Nash about an hour or so, Einstein advised him to read Physics more. It was this self-confidence that made him prove his theorems on ?game theory? despite getting disapproval on his ideas from none other than the great Jon Von Neumann, the father of game theory itself. And it was this self-confidence that took him through those 30 plus horrible years of his life that he spent battling paranoid schizophrenia.

Nash?s story is replete with cases where he took unsolved problems of Mathematics as challenge without having a proper background in those subjects but either solved them or gave a new insight to the problem.

So what is beautiful about all this? Its his unconventional way of approaching any problem .He showed an almost blatant disregard for the history .He never bothered to find out how many attempts have been done to solve the problem and what were the attempts like. It was his great belief in himself and rational thought that?s so beautiful.

It seems Nash never liked people much. He has a high respect for human intelligence and believes in its limitless power. He has found himself in the most awkward moments with general public (whom he of course considered as lesser mortals!) and his dry and scathing sense of humor has been no help either. He never learnt to speak how not to state the obvious.

He once told his elder son (by his mistress Eleanor) to give his younger brother company who is also suffering from the same disease, as he believed it would help him to be in the company of a ?lesser intelligent one?.

The world as it is, is very frustrating for an extremely rational mind like Nash?s .If the world wants to benefit from these great minds then it needs to accept them with their eccentricities. This requires a certain degree of planning on a micro level to ensure a proper structure conducive for these geniuses and fortunately for Nash he was born in America where institutes like Princeton and MIT has this structure in place.

Reading through the book one can?t help but notice the irony in Nash?s life. It was these lesser intellectuals like her wife, mother and mistress who stood by him to preserve his genius. It was these people who showed extra ordinary courage in tough situations and never broke down. The book is almost a tribute to feminism and one cant help but applaud for these ladies.

Being an engineer and having a general understanding of the problems that Nash worked on, probably I could appreciate the book much more than others. But the thing that appealed me most in the book other than the portrayal of Nash?s genius is the insight given about the academic life of America? s temples of education.

The life on these campuses (that I am sure must have changed positively since then) is intoxicating and an assurance for any academically inclined person. Besides, the working of noble committee and other information like this add appeal to the book.

I read the book after watching the movie and was surprised to find out that the director has taken full liberties in resorting to his fancy while making the movie instead of sticking to facts.

Nevertheless it?s a great movie and a must see, though to a reader of the book there are many things that could be added in the movie and a beautiful mind could have become more beautiful.

And about the book?a must, must read!!

Strongly recommended