A Beautiful Mind 内容简介

Stories of famously eccentric Princetonians abound--such as that of chemist Hubert Alyea, the model for The Absent-Minded Professor, or Ralph Nader, said to have had his own key to the library as an undergraduate. Or the "Phantom of Fine Hall," a figure many students had seen shuffling around the corridors of the math and physics building wearing purple sneakers and writing numerology treatises on the blackboards. The Phantom was John Nash, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his generation, who had spiraled into schizophrenia in the 1950s. His most important work had been in game theory, which by the 1980s was underpinning a large part of economics. When the Nobel Prize committee began debating a prize for game theory, Nash's name inevitably came up--only to be dismissed, since the prize clearly could not go to a madman. But in 1994 Nash, in remission from schizophrenia, shared the Nobel Prize in economics for work done some 45 years previously.
Economist and journalist Sylvia Nasar has written a biography of Nash that looks at all sides of his life. She gives an intelligent, understandable exposition of his mathematical ideas and a picture of schizophrenia that is evocative but decidedly unromantic. Her story of the machinations behind Nash's Nobel is fascinating and one of very few such accounts available in print (the CIA could learn a thing or two from the Nobel committees). This highly recommended book is indeed "a story about the mystery of the human mind, in three acts: genius, madness, reawakening." --Mary Ellen Curtin --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Nasar has written a notable biography of mathematical genius John Forbes Nash (b. 1928), a founder of game theory, a RAND Cold War strategist and winner of a 1994 Nobel Prize in economics. She charts his plunge into paranoid schizophrenia beginning at age 30 and his spontaneous recovery in the early 1990s after decades of torment. He attributes his remission to will power; he stopped taking antipsychotic drugs in 1970 but underwent a half-dozen involuntary hospitalizations. Born in West Virginia, the flamboyant mathematical wizard rubbed elbows at Princeton and MIT with Einstein, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener. He compartmentalized his secret personal life, shows Nasar, hiding his homosexual affairs with colleagues from his mistress, a nurse who bore him a son out of wedlock, while he also courted Alicia Larde, an MIT physics student whom he married in 1957. Their son, John, born in 1959, became a mathematician and suffers from episodic schizophrenia. Alicia divorced Nash in 1963, but they began living together again as a couple around 1970. Today Nash, whose mathematical contributions span cosmology, geometry, computer architecture and international trade, devotes himself to caring for his son. Nasar, an economics correspondent for the New York Times, is equally adept at probing the puzzle of schizophrenia and giving a nontechnical context for Nash's mathematical and scientific ideas.

A Beautiful Mind 目录

Prologue
Part One：A Beautiful Mind
1 Bluefield(1928—45)
2 Carnegie Institute of Technology(June 1945一June 1948)
3 The Center ofthe Universe(Princeton,Fall 1948)
4 School of Genius (Princcton,Fall 1948)
5 Genius(Princeton,1948—49)
6 Games fPrinceton,Spring 1949)
7 John von Neumann(Princeton．1948-49)
8 The Theory of Games
9 The Bargaining Problem (Princeton,Spring 1 949)
10 Nash’S Rival Idea(Princeton．1949-50)
11 Lloyd fPrinccton,1950)
12 The Wlar of Wits(RAND,Summer 1950)
13 Game Theory at RAND
14 The Draft(Princeton,1950-51)
15 A Beautiful Theorem(Princeton,1950-51)
16 MIT
17 Bad Boys
18 Experiments(RAND,Summer 1952)
19 Reds(Spring 1953)
20 Geometry
Part Two：Separate Lives
21 Singularity
22 A Special Friendship(Santa Monica,Summer 1952)
23 Eleanor
24 Jack
25 The Arrest(RAND,Summer，1954）
26 Alicia
27 The Courtship
28 Seattle(Summer 1956)
29 Death and Marriage fl 956-57)
Part Three：A Slow Fire Burning
30 Olden Lane and Washington Square(1 956-57)
31 The Bomb Factory
32 Secrets(Summer 1958)
33 Schemes fFali 1958)
34 The Emperor of Antarctica
35 In the Eye ofthe Storm(Spring 1959)
36 Day Breaks in Bowditch Hall
(McLean Hospital April-May 1959)
37 Mad Hatter's Tea(May-June 1959)
Part Four：The Lost Years
38 Citoyen du Monde fPansandGeneva,1959-60)
39 AbsoluteZero(Princeton．1960)
40 Tower of Silence(Trenton State Hospital 1961)
41 An Interlude of Enforced Rationality (July 1961-April 1963)
42 The“Blowing Up”Problem
(Princeton and Carrier Clinic,1963—65)
43 Solitude(Boston,1965-67)
44 A Man All Alone in a Strange World(Roanoke,1967--70)
45 Phantom of Fine Hall(Princeton,1970s)
46 A Quiet Life (Princeton,1970—90)
Part Five：The Most Worthy
47 Remission
48 The Prize
49 The Greatest Auction Ever
(Washington,D．C,ecember 1994)
50 Reawakening (Princeton,1995-97)
Epilogue
Notes
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

A Beautiful Mind 作者简介

Sylvia Nasar，Sylvia Nasar(born 1947 in Bavaria) is an American journalist and writer. A former economics reporter for the New York Times, she was recently named the Knight Chair in Business Journalism at Columbia University.
She described the life of John Forbes Nash in A Beautiful Mind (Simon & Schuster), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The book was adapted for the screen in 2001. She is currently writing a book entitled Grand Pursuit.
In 2006, she became embroiled in a controversy over her New Yorker article (co-written with David Gruber), Manifold Destiny.