A Beautiful Mind (30 page)

But, at the moment, these postures enhanced rather than detracted from Nash’s social appeal. Nash’s status as an instructor and his growing reputation as a mathematician brought him newfound respect. He was now considered interesting
company. His arrogance was seen as evidence of his genius, and so was his eccentricity, a source of both amusement and grudging respect, the other side of the genius coin, as it were. Fagi Levinson, the department’s den mother, said in 1996: “For Nash to deviate from convention is not as shocking as you might think. They were all prima donnas. If a mathematician was mediocre he had to toe the line and be conventional. If he was good, anything went.”
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Jerome Neuwirth, a graduate student at MIT, said, “When your solution turns out to be right, we give you your due. We give you a lot of leeway. Had Nash been less of a mathematician, he wouldn’t have gotten away with his nastiness.”
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Donald Newman added, “People were annoyed with him because he was flippant, but not really annoyed. They considered him a bad boy, but a great one, a great golden boy.”
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The gang around Nash included Newman, aka D.J., a Harvard graduate student who spent most of his time at MIT hanging out with his old friends from City College and with Nash, because “Harvard was too snooty.”
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Other members of the group included Walter Weissblum, a brilliant sad sack, drunk, and hunchback with a heart of gold, who never finished his degree;
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Harry Gonshor, who later became a professor at Rutgers, an oddball who wore Coke-bottle glasses, looked as if he were floating on air, and once proved a theorem so that it could be stated as “AFL = CIO”;
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Gustave Solomon, the most humane of the group, later a coinventor of the Reed-Solomon code;
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Leopold “Poldy” Flatto, an inveterate people-watcher and storyteller;
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and, after 1952, Jacob Leon Bricker, the group’s Woody Allen.
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Neuwirth, a latecomer to the group, said, “Who were we? What were we trying to do? Every group has its own currency. Our only currency is what we were thinking. Who’s smart? Who’s doing what? What can you solve? How far did you get? It doesn’t sound nice but it was exciting.”
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Nash’s closest equal, in brains, competitiveness, and general superciliousness, was Newman. Newman was considered a genius and the best problem solver of the group.
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A big, brash, blond swaggerer, Newman had the distinction, very impressive to Nash, of being a three-time Putnam winner. He was already a husband and father, with responsibilities that, however, did little to cramp his flamboyant style. He drove a flashy white Thunderbird with red leather seats that he liked to drag race along Memorial Drive in the middle of the night. As an undergraduate at City College, he’d been famous for stunts like turning up in the class of some unfortunate mathematics professor bearing an enormous tree branch, leaves and all, that he claimed was for a biology class.

Nash and Newman immediately recognized each other as kindred spirits. “They loved to spark each other,” Arthur Singer recalled.
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“They admired each other’s sarcasm,” said Mattuck. “It was all good-natured. But D.J. could make cracks much faster. He had instant recall when it came to mathematics. People used to say that D.J. could solve any problem that could be done in twenty-four hours.
Newman didn’t have the power of Nash’s sustained concentration. Nash could think about a problem for half a year.”
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Newman went to a seminar given by Nash. “I sat in on some of Nash’s lectures,” said Newman, who was intrigued rather than put off. “It was different, kind of exciting. He wandered, unlike most lecturers, because he liked to explore a lot of things at once. It was kind of nice… . We chewed each other out,” Newman recalled. “Nash and I were friendly friends.”
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Thanks to the acceptance of Newman and his friends, Nash acquired a real social life. The crowd often ate lunch together in Walker Memorial, but it also gathered after hours at various cheap restaurants, coffee shops, and beer halls that were as plentiful in 1950s Cambridge and Boston as they are today, places that didn’t mind if you nursed a beer all night and were willing to write separate checks.
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They included famous Boston restaurants like Durgin Park, which served generous helpings of traditional New England dishes, including a sinfully delicious roast beef and Indian pudding; Jake Wirth, an old-style German establishment with a mammoth oak bar; and the Wursthaus in Harvard Square. Other favorites were Cronin’s, Chez Dreyfus, and the Newbury Steakhouse. The Hayes-Bickford and the Waldorf, which were both Horn & Hardart-style coffee shops, open most of the night, were also frequent gathering places. At other times, everybody would hang out at some graduate student’s apartment, or go to parties given by the Martins, Levinsons, and in the mid-1950s, the Minskys.

Within his new circle, Nash strove to constantly underscore his own uniqueness, superiority, and self-sufficiency. “I’m Nash with a capital N!” his whole manner shouted.
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He was always saying that only one or two people in the department — Wiener was always one of these — were up to his standard. His putdowns were legendary. “You’re a child,” was a favorite expression. “You don’t know crap. How trivial! How stupid! You’ll never do anything!” he would say.
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He loved to perform. At parties, he acted rather than conversed. Once, at the Minskys’, Nash demanded that his listeners challenge him with a difficult mathematical problem. He said, “I’ve had a few drinks. Are my thinking powers stronger or weaker on drink?”
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He was not above dissembling slightly to wow an audience.
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He would pout if he was bested in an argument.
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And he hated being challenged by someone he considered to be an inferior. One day in the common room, a group of students was talking about a famous World War II logistics puzzle, the “Jeep” problem.
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The essence of the Jeep problem is that you want to cross the two-thousand-mile-wide Sahara desert but the Jeep’s gas tank holds only enough gas to travel two hundred miles. The only way to cross the desert is to follow a two-steps-forward, one-step-back strategy: to load up the Jeep with cans of gasoline, drive, say, one hundred miles, drop off the cans, and go back to the starting point. Then you get
more cans of gas, go one hundred miles, unload some and use some to top off the gas in the tank, go another one hundred miles, and go back, picking up some more gasoline. The question is, how many gallons would be needed?

There is no optimal solution to the problem, as it turns out. Everybody was proposing solutions. Nash threw out a number. Nash’s grader that term, Seymour Haber, proposed a number half as big. Nash contemptuously dismissed Haber’s solution. When Haber insisted that he prove it, Nash said, “My solution’s much better.”

Haber recounted: “I didn’t see it. I insisted that he prove it. He didn’t want to. He said it was obvious. I still wouldn’t accept his assertion. So he did the calculation. He turned out to be mostly right, but he was extremely annoyed with me. He was angry for my having forced him to do this grungy work when it was perfectly clear all along what the answer was. He was angry with me for some period afterward.”

Nor was he above putting the audience down. A typical example: at lunch one day, a graduate student was describing an axiomatic approach to a problem outlined by one of his professors. Nash fairly exploded, “Don’t give me all that crap! Tell me how you’d solve the problem. You haven’t learned anything. All these concepts don’t mean a thing.”
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Nash’s putdowns of other mathematicians earned him the sobriquet “Gnash.” Nash responded,
“G
obviously stands for genius. In fact, there are few geniuses these days here at MIT. Me, of course, and also Norbert Wiener. Even Norbert may no longer be a genius, but there is evidence that he once was.” After that, he referred to Gnu (Newman) and G-squared (Andrew Gleason, a young Harvard professor who had just solved Hilbert’s fifth problem).
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When John McCarthy, whom Nash knew from Princeton, gave a seminar in the department, Nash pulled him aside afterward and said, “There are too many journals. There are too many trashy papers being published. There are too many guys doing research. Only a few of us should be in research. The rest of them should be in sin x” — a snide reference to the tables at the back of high-school trigonometry books.
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Nash flaunted his social snobbery, a legacy of his Bluefield upbringing. He implied that he came from old money.
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He would sniff wine at a party and say, “This is an adequate Chianti.”
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Nowhere was his snobbery more evident than in his reaction to being “a non-Jew in a definitely Jewish atmosphere.”
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Later, when Nash became paranoid and embraced all sorts of strange delusions, he wrote letters to Newman and others addressed to “Jewboy,” became obsessed with the state of Israel, and talked about “Krypto-Zionist conspiracies.”
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But in the early 1950s, his attitude was merely one of social superiority. He frequently told Newman that he looked “too Jewish.”
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Like Groucho Marx, he was inclined not to admire any club that accepted him. Nash displayed a contempt for people and things he considered beneath him. As Fred Brauer, another instructor at MIT, put it forty years later, “That covered a lot of territory.”
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18
Experiments
RAND, Summer 1952

O
NE AFTERNOON
during Nash’s second summer in Santa Monica, he and Harold N. Shapiro, another mathematician from RAND, were swimming in the surf off Santa Monica Beach just south of the pier.
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The ocean was fairly rough. Below the breakwater, Santa Monica Beach was a narrow and steep strip of sand with breakers that were usually six to ten feet high. It was a favorite of body surfers.

Nash and Shapiro were far from shore when they were caught in a powerful current that swept them farther out. Both men were strong swimmers. Nash was “built like a Greek god,” Shapiro recalled, and he, too, was sturdy and muscular. But Shapiro remembers being dragged under the waves, briefly overpowered by the current, and very frightened. Nash seemed to be struggling as well. “It was hard work getting back to shore,” Shapiro said. When the two young men finally reached the beach, they threw themselves on the sand, exhausted and breathing heavily. Shapiro recalled lying there, thinking how lucky they were not to have drowned. To his amazement, however, Nash jumped to his feet after a moment or two and announced he was going back into the water. “I wonder if that was an accident,” Nash said in a calm and detached tone. “I think I’ll go back in and see.”

At the beginning of that second summer, Nash had driven cross-country from Bluefield to Santa Monica in a rusty old Dodge. He and John Milnor, who was by now a graduate student at Princeton, made the trip together, though Milnor drove his own car.
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Traveling with them were Nash’s younger sister Martha and Ruth Hincks, a journalism major at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, who joined them at the last minute.
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They met in Chapel Hill, then drove on to Bluefield. Hincks remembers being warned not to let slip that Martha would be sharing the apartment with Milnor as well as Nash. She recalled in 1997 that this secretiveness struck her as strange. As they started out, Ruth drove with Nash, Martha with Milnor. Ruth was struck by Nash’s complete indifference to her. “I was slim, attractive, intelligent,” she recalled in 1997. Nash “never even noticed that I was there,” she said. She was also struck by the seemingly distant relationship between Nash and Milnor. “They just sort of stood around. They could have met
the day before. They never referred to shared experiences. They didn’t seem to really know each other.” Even the relationship between brother and sister seemed “a little standoffish, not affectionate at all,” said Ruth. “I don’t think I saw any affection from anybody on that trip.”

They traveled on U.S. 40, which took them through Kansas and Nebraska.
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They stopped once for a day in Grand Lakes, Colorado, where they all went horseback riding, and also in Salt Lake City, where they visited the Mormon Temple. The men put the young women in charge of divvying up all the motel, restaurant, and gas bills. All should have been fine for these young people, privileged as few were, in 1952, to be traveling cross-country on their own. Yet before the trip was over, Nash and Ruth had quarreled, and Martha, who had been riding with Milnor, was forced, reluctantly, to ride with her older brother for the remainder of the journey.
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It started as a fine adventure. Martha had just graduated from Chapel Hill, and had traveled very little before.
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Tall and striking like her brother, Martha was extremely intelligent. In spite of a fierce determination not to be regarded as an egghead and an oddball, Martha had won a Pepsi-Cola scholarship by beating every boy at Beaver High on the SATs and had received invitations to apply to Radcliffe, Smith, and other top women’s schools. Her father, however, had turned down the scholarship on her behalf, saying that the family could afford tuition at a nearby school, and Martha wound up at St. Mary’s, a junior college attended mostly by well-to-do southern girls who brought fur coats with them, rode horses, and were themselves being groomed not for the job but for the marriage market. After graduating from St. Mary’s, she went on to the University of North Carolina, where she completed a teaching degree.