Name: John Nash • Gender: Male
Nationality: American
Date of birth: 1928
area of expertise: Economics (Game Theory)
School: Princeton
English Name: JOHN F.NASH
Honors: 1994 Nobel laureate in economics, United States
Major events
in the life of a member of the Econometrics Committee : Nash was just in his early 20s when he was a PhD in Princeton. His doctoral dissertation on non-cooperative games and two other related articles established his status as a master of game theory. By the end of the 1950s, he was already a world-famous scientist.
However, just as his career was in full swing, Tian was jealous of talents, and he suffered from severe schizophrenia. Thanks to the loving care of his ex-wife Alicia and the selfless help of many friends and colleagues at Princeton University, he did not live on the streets and eventually pushed him to the Nobel Prize in Economics (awarded in 1994).
Nash said that he actually only did two things: one is to study the problem of bargaining; the other is to pay attention to economic issues and analyze them from a mathematical perspective.
John Nash
Recently, mathematician John Nash (John Nash) went to China to attend the World Mathematics Congress, visited a number of campuses, wherever he went, caused a sensation, is one of the most watched scientific "stars" of the conference. The reason for this is that in addition to his winning the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994, the movie "A BEAUTIFUL MIND" released earlier this year introduced this twentieth century mathematics wizard to the masses outside of academia. I believe it also played a big role. . I went to see this movie as soon as it was released. At that time, there were still a few months before it won this year's Oscar for best director and many other awards. The theater was deserted and the audience was only about 20%. It's nothing more than the story of a mathematician who got mentally ill. In many people's minds, genius mathematicians are a bit nervous. They belong to the kind of people who will bump into telegraph poles when they walk in meditation all day long. How many people will be interested? Although the film later won an Oscar, it was only an academic evaluation, and there seemed to be no outstanding performance at the box office. More than seven years ago, when Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics, the author was attracted by a long report describing his life. It mentioned that the peak of his legitimate career was unfortunately terminally ill-schizophrenia, and almost lost. As a homeless person living on the streets, fortunately his former wife and colleagues did not abandon him. Under their long-term care and care, his mental illness disappeared miraculously, and he was finally awarded the Nobel Prize after 30 years of obscurity. Academic awards. The story is ups and downs, fascinating, and unforgettable.
In China, there is the article "Love Yucheng" published by Wang Zeke in the sixth issue of "Reading" magazine in 1995. Because of this "relationship", I, a person who usually doesn't like watching movies, decided to take a sneak peek and see how the movie reproduces such a legend who is still alive in the world. The movie is undoubtedly a success, and it allows me to relive my feelings about life when I first read the story of Nash seven years ago. But after watching the movie, I felt a little uneasy. This is the description of Nash's mathematics research in the movie almost entirely focused on deciphering the code. This is something I have never heard of before, and it is not mentioned in the article "Lost Years". Is it because I am ignorant and ignorant of him. Important work in this area? Wouldn't it be the spread of falsehood and misunderstandings? With this in mind, I found a biography of Nash with the same name as the movie that was widely circulated in the market (Author: Sylvia Nasar) read carefully. It took several months to read the book of more than 400 pages intermittently, and a stone in my heart finally fell: Nash had not done the work of deciphering the code, it can be said that he has not even touched it. The author of the movie script "made up random" on this point, obviously out of consideration of increasing the box office value. Because most of Nash’s research is in the highly abstract field of mathematics, it is his work in game theory that won him the Nobel Prize in Economics. It was originally the content of his early doctoral thesis. This is probably the most important of all his research results. One item with practical applications. Later, his research increasingly moved towards the "pure" mathematics fields such as topology and differential equations. If the script writer truthfully reflects Nash's research work, this story that would not have easily aroused people's interest would be like "playing the piano to a cow" to the general audience. So they had to hide the truth and make up some fake words to attract the audience. Deciphering the code became a "scientific research project" imposed on Mr. Nash, and became the main thread throughout the story. This choice is due to the "national conditions" of the United States. The United States is a pragmatic country. The scientific issues that are advanced and far from practical applications are only the research objects of a "small group" of people. They are marginal figures in society-no one criticizes them for being "divorced from reality" because there is no one at all. Care about them. Unlike in China, a reportage of "Goldbach Conjecture" can arouse a "mass movement" of thousands of amateur researchers. Just a few years ago, the "Fermat's Last Theorem", a major problem that has plagued the mathematics community for more than three centuries, was proved, and newspapers also reported, but there was almost no response from the American people. The mathematician who proved the "Fermat's Last Theorem" Still unknown outside the professional circle. In China, he will definitely become a household name like Chen Jingrun. It is needless to say that the leaders of the leadership cordially received him. The democratic and non-democratic parties will definitely invite him to join the party, and the title of deputies to the National People's Congress or CPPCC member will be sent to the door. .
The common people in the United States are concerned about the rise and fall of prices and the winning or losing of teams after work. For such audiences, to make them understand the work of mathematicians, deciphering the code may be the only appropriate mathematical problem. Its practical application is often mentioned in novels and movies about World War II. For example, the U.S. military successfully shot down the 56th plane of the Navy Commander Yamamoto after deciphering the secret code of the Japanese military, and reported its revenge on Pearl Harbor. This is the most talked-about story of the Americans. Therefore, a Nash who is engaged in the work of deciphering codes is probably the best fit for the image of a mathematician in the eyes of the public. Moreover, deciphering the code, a "scientific research project" made out of nothing, is also convenient for screenwriters to pull the same Soviet "hand-held nuclear bomb" threat into the plot, adding dramatic scenes such as the Cold War, conspiracy, espionage, and terrorist activities. In the United States after September 11, it undoubtedly greatly increased the box office value of the story. The movie even created such a thrilling scene: Nash became the target of assassination because of the secret work of deciphering the code, and almost died in a car chase and gun battle. Nash was so scared that his soul was out of his body, and he couldn't stop, and he became insane.
However, these are "joking Nash" created by the director. Although the movie has been enhanced by this, it is far from the real Nash. He has never gone to the Pentagon for top-secret work.
In his life, Kaunas had a little bit of a tie with the defense department twice. The first time was in the summer of 1948. He was twenty years old that year. He had just graduated from Carnegie Mellon University. Princeton University had accepted him but had not yet enrolled. He found a summer job in a naval research project on the outskirts of the capital, Washington. . In addition to the Americans, the mathematicians in this project also had prisoners captured from Nazi Germany. Nash wasted a summer vacation in such a group and achieved nothing. Fortunately, people don't expect what a student can do in a summer job. The second time he dealt with classified work was two years later. Nash had completed the paper that later won him the Nobel Prize and became a rising star in the field of game theory. He was hired as a consultant by the RAND Corporation. The RAND company was nominally an organization affiliated to Douglas Aircraft Company at the time, but everyone knew it was a strategic think tank for the Air Force. They invited Nash to rely on his knowledge in game theory, and it has nothing to do with breaking the code. Game theory is a branch of mathematics founded by the great mathematician von Neumann of the 20th century during World War II, and has been applied in the US Navy’s anti-submarine warfare against Nazi Germany. After the end of the war, the US military hopes to expand its application to economic, social, and political fields, and especially hopes to rely on it to provide a strategic theoretical basis for defeating the enemy in the newly unfolded "Cold War."
Therefore, RAND was commissioned by the military to collect a group of top mathematics like Nash for research in this area. Nash served as a consultant to the RAND Corporation for four years, and went to the RAND Corporation for research every summer. However, during this period, he and his team did not produce any breakthrough results. The reason is that game theory was still in its infancy at the time, and people had too high expectations for its application value. Facts have proved that its important application in the field of economics has to wait a generation, as well as the work of a large number of mathematicians and economists, including the other two scholars who shared the 1994 Nobel Prize with Nash. Will be displayed. So, by 1954, RAND's enthusiasm for game theory had cooled. That summer, Nash left the RAND Corporation. Nash's departure was caused by an accidental event. The movie does not reflect this rather dramatic event, it detracts from Nash's image-it turns out that Nash is gay. In the 1950s, the acceptance of homosexuality by people and the government was not as high as it is now. Santa Monica, Los Angeles, where the RAND Corporation is located, was again an area where homosexuals were infested, and the police often set up traps in that area. One day in the middle of the night, Nash was caught in a toilet in a park by a police officer who was dressed as a homosexual. The matter was reported to the company. According to the confidentiality regulations, homosexuals were “weak judgment” and “prone to blackmail.” The RAND company had no choice but to immediately revoke his top-secret work permit and ask him to leave. He wouldn't even let him go back to clean up his own office. Since then, Nash has not done any confidential research work. In fact, Nash's interest is no longer in game theory. As early as when he was writing the doctoral dissertation in game theory, he had already begun his pioneering work on algebraic flow patterns and published his research results in 1951. In the eyes of many elites in mathematics, this is what a mathematical genius should do, and game theory does not seem to be the orthodox of mathematics. Besides, geniuses like Nash are all wild masters. Where will they conduct research in accordance with the tasks assigned by their leaders? Due to his later mental disorder, Nash's research career was only about ten years, but looking at his short academic life, you will find that he always finds problems by himself, or raises problems by himself, and then solves them. These questions belong to many very different areas of mathematics. In his view, mathematics is not an orderly subject, but a bunch of difficult problems to be solved. As long as the problem arouses his interest, and it is difficult enough to stimulate his desire to attack, he will go there resolutely, no matter which field the problem belongs to. So he can write game theory at the same time And the papers on algebraic flow patterns, and later also had first-rate work in the fields of geometry, topology, differential equations and so on. This sounds a bit like "changing a place with one shot", which is completely different from Chen Jingrun's lifelong style of sticking to a problem. What people have to admire is that he often gets into the situation quickly after changing a place and hits the target, even though others have already shot many false bullets in this place. His distinctive working style is also reflected in his originality. Faced with a problem, he did not go to the library to find documents on this issue, because, in his opinion, since the predecessors did the work and the problem remains, it shows that these documents are useless and will only frame the thinking of future generations. Enter the same dead end.
Therefore, his method of solving problems is to create new ways and think what others would not dare to think, and the results are often unexpected. Of course, this working style is inseparable from his mathematical genius, and it is not something most people can learn to imitate. His biography and movie use "A Beautiful Fort’s principles are only limited to the description of observables, and he wants to find the unobservable reality behind them. This is a major issue that has been debated for nearly a century since the birth of quantum theory. The two parties involved in the debate are the founders of quantum theory such as Boll and Einstein.
Obviously, the "unobservable reality" pursued by Nash belongs to the same idea as Einstein's "hidden parameter", and he is critical of the "Copenhagen interpretation" that Bohr, Heisenberg, and others believe that there is no reality outside the observable world. For this reason, he had a heated argument with Oppenheimer, the American "father of the atomic bomb" who was the dean of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study at the time, so that he later wrote a letter apologizing to Oppenheimer for his attitude. Many years later, Nash said that when he tried to resolve the inherent contradictions of quantum theory, he "may be overpowered and out of balance in his spirit." Regardless of the reason, his mental illness really broke out more than a year later. The symptoms were not as described in the movie. He always felt that the official of the Ministry of National Defense followed him and asked him to go back to do the dangerous work of deciphering the code. His schizophrenia is not that of fear, but of delusion. In the autumn of 1958, when he was just 30 years old, while walking with two foreign students, he suddenly said something incomprehensible alone. The content seemed to be that he was worried that world peace would be threatened, that a world government needed to be established to defend peace, and so on. One day shortly after the new year, he took the New York Times and pointed to the article in the upper left corner of the front page. He told people that the secret inside was the password for the alien government that only he understood to communicate with him. He wanted to tell the world about this secret. . Once again, he replaced his name on an expired driver’s license with a student’s nickname, and told the student that it was an "intergalactic driver’s license." He was a member of a committee and appointed the student as the head of the Asian region. . Nash is usually smart and witty, and likes to make some weird jokes. At first, others were stunned, thinking he was joking and didn't take it seriously. Until later, the Department of Mathematics of the University of Chicago, promoted by Mr. Chern, gave Nash a letter of appointment and gave him a high-status faculty position. Nash wrote a rejection letter in which he said that he would not be able to take up his post because he already had another senior-he was going to be the "Emperor of Antarctica"! At that time, MIT was considering promoting him in order to retain talents. After learning this letter, he realized that Nash was ill, and he was very sick. In April 1959, Nash was taken to the hospital.
One of the symptoms of Nash's psychosis is that he delusionally wants to be in charge of himself, leads the world peace movement, and claims to be the "Prince of Peace." To this end, he wrote countless letters to politicians and United Nations officials from all over the world, discussing with them the establishment of a world government, safeguarding world peace, and realizing world unity. Before he entered the hospital for the first time, the secretary in the department discovered that he had sent letters to the ambassadors of many countries in the United States, and later even drove to Washington to deliver letters to various embassies. His behavior lasted for a long time, intermittently with the ups and downs of his illness. What is interesting is that he also wrote a letter to our great leader, which he asked Princeton’s Department of Mathematics to forward. At that time, there was no exchange between China and the United States, so it was natural that he could not "reach foreign countries" for him. This happened in 1962, at the time when the China Earth Learning Movement was surging. If there were "Flying Goose, Sending a Letter to Beijing", I would be cheered by revolutionary youths as the latest example of "The people of the world miss Chairman Mao day and night", just like today's patriotic youth cheering Lei Feng's spirit at West Point. The military academy continues to flourish. Nash also has a letter that arouses the interest of our Chinese readers. It was written to a former colleague, but the reply address was very strange "Heilwigklang University, Harbin, Manchuria". For some reason, he used the full The state is Harbin instead of Harbin, China. The name of the university is probably due to the scribbled handwriting. It must be a misspelling of Heilongjiang University. The content of the letter is incomprehensible, and vaguely talks about the nuclear war on the Sino-Soviet border. The signature of the letter is "Chiang Hsin (New River)", because he specifically indicated the meaning after the name, so it should obviously be translated as Jiang Xin. This letter was written in 1967. At that time, American newspapers undoubtedly had many reports on China's Cultural Revolution in full swing. According to some people’s memories, he was paying attention to "Mao Zedong's politics" at the time. The name Jiang Xin came from the banner bearer of the Cultural Revolution. Inspired by the name Chiang Chin. It's really fortunate that he is so crazy, with the wind and thunder of the five continents, the clouds and the water in the world in his chest, and the Chinese people in his heart.
Nash not only wrote letters everywhere advocating his world unity, but also took practical actions. He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for observation and treatment for the first time and was discharged after fifty days. After he was discharged from the hospital, half out of resentment for the MIT school who sent him to a mental hospital, half out of yearning for a "global citizen", he ignored the department's retention of him and resigned from the school and went to Europe. The first thing to do in Europe is the American embassy in Luxembourg announced the renunciation of American citizenship. Later, he went to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva and the Swiss government to apply for refugee status. He claimed to be a refugee from a member country of the North Atlantic Treaty, Warsaw Treaty, Middle East Treaty, and Southeast Asia Treaty. Mathematical study of national defense. Naturally, people found him to be a lunatic, and all these efforts were unsuccessful. So he abandoned his American passport and once went to Leipzig, which belongs to East Germany, by himself. How did the East German authorities allow a person without a passport to enter the country? Do you think that this scientist from the United States has some use value? It remains a mystery to this day. The U.S. government didn’t care about Nash’s actions of “nothing to the motherland” and “treason to the enemy”. Its embassies and consulates in Europe helped him solve the problem of identity in Europe many times, and finally sent people to East Germany to take him. Take it back and send it back to your country. Originally, a person should not be responsible for his actions when he is in a state of insanity. That said, the reason why Nash had these "left-leaning" thoughts-even though they were imaginary when he was insane-also reflects the trend of thought that prevailed among Western intellectuals in his time. At that time, not long after the end of World War II, many intellectuals still remember the destruction of civilization and the destruction of life by the war. The establishment of a world government to maintain lasting world peace had a broad market among them. Intellectual leaders such as Einstein and Sartre have all supported the movement to establish a world government. Obviously, this sense of world unity and world citizenship is related to some of Nash's words and deeds after he became insane. In addition, because the Soviet Union played an important role in the anti-fascist war, communism also had a considerable influence in the intellectual circles at that time. Among the people Nash contacted, Oppenheimer was deprived of access to classified materials during the McCarthyism era because of his unclear relationship with the Communist Party. This is a well-known example. The mathematics department of Massachusetts Institute of Technology where Nash teaches is almost like the "house" of the Communist Party. The director, deputy director and a full professor are all former U.S. Communist Party members and key members of the local branch where the school is located. Among the students in the Department of Mathematics is the leader of the U.S. Communist Party Browder (Earl Browder)’s three sons. (In the material on the history of the international communist movement that the author studied that year, "Browder revisionism" is a modern revisionism that is older than Tito.) These people are lifelong friends who have been caring about and helping Nash later. They are at McCarthy. The period has been investigated by the FBI. The MIT school specially hired a lawyer to defend them, so that they were able to tide over the difficulties. Although Nash is not a politically active person, living in such an era and environment, witnessing the experiences of his mentors and friends, that kind of anger and fear towards the state apparatus is the same as his always wanting to stay away from his own country after being insane. It's not unrelated.
In the spring of 1960, Nash returned to the United States from Europe. He was not regarded as a "citizen of the world" and lost his job. His condition is good and bad. His wife divorced him in 1963. As long as his condition improves, his academic friends, from Oppenheimer and below, have tried to help him arrange jobs so that he can have an income to treat the illness, but the results are often disappointing. Later, he simply returned to his hometown in West Virginia to live with his widowed mother. At the end of 1969, his mother also passed away, and Nash had only his sister in this world. But his sister also had her own family to take care of, so she had to send her brother to a mental hospital again. At the beginning of 1970, Nash came out of the mental hospital and faced an unaccompanied world, a vast world, and it seemed that there was no place for him to stand. At this time, he made a decision that was important for the rest of his life: returning to Princeton. If he stays in his hometown, he may become a madman on the streets. What will happen to him in the end is really unthinkable. In Princeton, he was accepted by his ex-wife, freeing him from food and lodging. More importantly, there is a familiar environment and mentors who care about him. There are world-class universities, many scholars, many mathematicians, and in short, a place full of intellectuals. The pile of intellectuals is said to be not conducive to ideological reform, but it is definitely conducive to the improvement of Nash's condition. He is accepted and respected by the people here. If any ignorant young man insults him lightly, someone will stand up and teach him: "Your kid may not be able to make his achievements in your life!" Here, he learned to use The computer, he is not a staff member of the school, so the administrator of the computer gives him his account. According to Nash himself, using a computer reduced his delusions and greatly contributed to his improvement. Of course, the most important thing is that he can continue to participate in some academic activities here, listen to academic lectures, communicate with former colleagues and students, so that colleagues in the academic world know that he is still alive and increasingly recovering. This created a prerequisite for him to be considered by the Nobel Prize Committee. Finally, when the Nobel Prize was about to be announced, Princeton University gave him the title of "Visiting Cooperative Researcher" so that he would not go to Stockholm to receive the award as a social worker. Nash won the Nobel Prize, and his ex-wife remarried him. But the ending of his story is not like the ending of a fairy tale, "he has lived a happy life since then." The bonus is divided among three people, which is not too much. When he first learned of the award, he once expressed how much he hoped that the bonus would be given to him alone. Now, they still live in their original house, which is close to the railway station so that their wives can go to work. Have moved to a noble residential area. They have a mentally ill son to take care of and worry about his medical treatment and future.
The name of the movie "A Beautiful Mind" was moved from the title of Nash's biography. The biographer said this was suggested by a colleague of Nash. As I said earlier, I mainly praised his intelligence. Therefore, it is better to translate it into "subtle thinking". Nowadays, people usually translate it as "beautiful mind", which does not conform to the original meaning. And it causes misunderstanding, because the term “beauty of the soul” in Chinese refers to the nobility of the moral realm. Whether it is a biographer or a film director, obviously he does not praise Nash's moral sentiment. When it comes to Nash's morality, I am afraid that there is nothing indisputable. The most unforgivable thing is that he met a young girl when he was young. The two lived together for a period of time and gave birth to a son, but Nash was unwilling to marry this lady, and he was unwilling to pay for his son’s support. Although he had a well-paid faculty at MIT at the time, the poor child grew up with a single mother in hardship, and failed to get the warmth of the family and a good education. After Nash's parents knew this, they had strictly ordered their son to marry the woman, but Nash never followed his orders. According to his mother, his father died of illness shortly afterwards, and his anger for his son's absurdity was one reason. Of course, people are not sages, and we cannot ask them to be both mathematics geniuses and moral models. What is valuable is that Nash himself adopted a "Swiss-style neutral policy" for biographers writing about the absurdity and stinking things of his youth. This kind of calm attitude towards the mathematician who was named after his life: John is open-minded, and it is worthy of being qualified to be written. The legendary elite is cited as a role model.
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