A Beautiful Mind

The award-winning movie A Beautiful Mind is about the life of Dr. John Nash, a mathematician who won the 1994 Nobel prize in economics for his work in game theory. The movie is about Dr. Nash's struggle with mental illness (paranoid schizophrenia). It is also a love story between Dr. Nash and his wife Alicia.

It's a wonderful movie, very moving. I recommend it. But do not think that it is all literally true. Differences between the movie and reality are discussed here. For example, the movie highlights the love between Dr. Nash and his wife as the one steady thing in his life, neglecting to mention that they were divorced from 1963 to 2001, when they remarried.

While the movie leaves out some important facts, such as the divorce, it invents others. For example, the two most moving scenes in the movie—the pen ceremony tradition at Princeton and Dr. Nash's speech at the Nobel prize ceremony—are both fictitious, completely fabricated by Hollywood (see this link).

Dr. Nash won the Nobel prize in 1994 for work done in 1950-1953, before he was married to Alicia in 1957, before the onset of his schizophrenia in 1959 (later in life than depicted in the movie), and even before the Nobel prize in economics was established in 1968. Dr. Nash shared the Nobel prize with Dr. John Harsanyi and Dr. Reinhard Selten, who did work in the 1960s that built on Dr. Nash's earlier work. Click here for a good, brief discussion of their various works that led to the prize.

The Nobel Prize web site is a wonderful source of information about Nobel Prize winners. For Dr. Nash they have the following resources:

Autobiography
Prize Seminar (good discussion of the math)
2004 Interview (discusses the movie, among other things)
Photo Gallery
Other Resources

The autobiography is fascinating. A piece of trivia from it: he had a choice of attending graduate school at either Harvard or Princeton. He chose Princeton because "the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous since I had not actually won the Putnam competition." (Several top scorers in the Putnam competition win a monetary prize, but only one winner is awarded a scholarship for graduate studies at Harvard, the alma mater of William Lowell Putnam.)

UPDATE 9/26/10: I found this cartoon about Nash and Feynman amusing (source):

It's funnier if you've watched the movie A Beautiful Mind and if you know a little about Richard Feynman.