A Beautiful Mind (47 page)

Nash never made any advances or ever said anything personal to Cohen. But he dropped hints. He’d say things like “So and So was a homosexual,” Cohen recalled. Or he’d say a word and ask Cohen if he knew what it meant. If Cohen
said no, Nash would come back with “Oh, you don’t know what so and so means.” People around the department were soon gossiping that Nash was in love with Cohen.
²⁷

Cohen was flattered, even fascinated, by Nash’s interest, but he took special delight in rubbing Nash’s face in the disparity between the grandiose claims and reality. He was critical, to the point of viciousness, of Nash’s hubris. Later, Cohen would say, “Mathematically I didn’t interact with him. I didn’t feel I could talk to him about mathematics.”

But they did talk a good deal about Nash’s ideas on the Riemann Hypothesis. “Nash thought he could work on any problem he wanted,” said Cohen in a tone of mild outrage. “He wrote a letter to Ingham, and he passed it around. I shot it down. What he was trying to do, you couldn’t do. I would have been very unsympathetic to Nash’s notion. The Riemann Hypothesis can’t be solved as stated. He came by with this letter. But any expert would have said these ideas are naive. What I admired is the enormous self-confidence to even conjecture. If he’s right, this guy’s intuition is in the stratosphere. But it turned out to be just another wrong idea.”

A year later, after he had been hospitalized, some blamed disappointed love and the intense rivalry with a younger man for Nash’s breakdown.
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Ironically, Cohen’s career wound up mirroring Nash’s. After his great success, he turned to the Riemann Hypothesis and physics. He did publish, but rarely and never anything that rivaled the work he did before age thirty. “Nothing was worthy of his notice,” said a mathematician who knew him at MIT. “He sat in glorious isolation.”
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34
The Emperor of Antarctica

There is a kindling. A slow fire burning.

—
J
OSEPH
B
RENNER
, psychiatrist, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997

S
OMEONE WAS CALLING,
“It’s time to play charades. It’s time to play charades.”
¹
A crowd of costumed guests filled the entire ground floor of the Mosers’ small frame house in Needham. Outside, snow had been falling for hours. Inside, the atmosphere was thick with smoke, liquor, jazz. Everyone was talking, laughing a little louder than usual, heads close together, waving cigarettes, posing for the camera, still a bit self-conscious but already loosening up in the carnival-like atmosphere. The Mosers were dressed as pirate and Indian squaw. Karin Tate, Artin’s musician daughter, was dressed as a black cat. Her husband, John, the algebraist, came as the Vector Space Man, wearing a metal cap with bobbing antennae and arrows all over his chest. Gian-Carlo Rota looked as elegant as ever in his monk’s tunic, his dark-haired wife, Teresa, dashing in her Spanish bolero and slim black pants.

Richy Emery, the Mosers’ son, watched through the dining-room window as a big dark car pulled into the driveway and a virtually naked man got out. There was a pounding on the kitchen door and Richy ran to open it. As Nash came striding into the room, followed by Alicia, heads turned, eyebrows shot up, and conversation suddenly quieted. Alicia was laughing excitedly and Nash wore a smirky smile as they surveyed the astonished guests. He was barefoot and entirely naked except for a diaper and a sash, which was draped across his powerful chest, that had the numerals
1959
written on it. Having stolen the show, Nash grinned and bowed, waved a baby bottle full of milk at the assembled company, which was laughing loudly at this point — and then sauntered into the living room to join in the game of charades.

Jürgen and Gertrude were just dividing the guests into two teams. Nash was on one team, Richy on the other. When it was Richy’s turn, Nash walked over to him and whispered in his ear the name of the character that he was supposed to act out. Richy was delighted. He adored Nash, who was much younger and more animated than most of Jürgen’s math friends. Richy’s pantomime initially mystified everyone. Finally a woman, the best player in the room, read his eleven-year-old
mind:
The Critique of Pure R£ason!
Richy looked over at Nash, who shrugged his shoulders and gave him a big grin.

Between that New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1958, and the last day in February, as his fellow mathematicians and friends looked on in puzzlement, Nash would undergo a strange and horrible metamorphosis. But on New Year’s Eve, he was, by all accounts, simply his flamboyant, eccentric, and slightly off-key self, playful and mischievous. Alicia was in high spirits as well. The idea for Nash’s costume had been hers.
²
She was the one who sewed it, draped his sash, and choreographed the entrance a moment past midnight. There is no hint of unease or premonition in the photograph of Nash sprawling somewhat drunkenly, with a laughing, gleeful Alicia on his lap, her arm on his shoulder. Most of the evening, though, it was Nash who was curled up in Alicia’s lap. Some of the other partygoers found it extremely bizarre, “really gruesome,” “disturbing.”

Nash had already crossed some invisible threshold. The feverish activity and the fierce competition with Cohen and Newman in the common room, so noticeable in the early fall, had already slowed. He seemed a trifle more withdrawn, a little spacier. A graduate student who had just come into Nash’s orbit recalled his not being able to keep up with Cohen and Newman. Paul Cohen recalled in 1996 that that fall Nash would make little jokes, little offhand remarks about world affairs, interesting license numbers, and the like. They were funny — Nash was always very bright and very witty — but they showed that something was not all right. “I’d think, ‘That’s going a little too far,’” Cohen said.
³

Nash started singling out individuals. One was a senior named Al Vasquez, who had never taken a course from Nash and was something of a protégé of Paul Cohen’s. “I’d see him in the common room. He’d say something. It wasn’t a conversation. More like a monologue. He gave me preprints of his articles and asked me strange questions about them.”
⁴

But none of this was especially alarming or suggested outright illness, just another stage in the evolution of Nash’s eccentricity. His conversation, as Raoul Bott put it, had “always mixed mathematics and myth.”
⁵
His conversational style had always been a bit odd. He never seemed to know when to speak up or shut up or take part in ordinary give and take. Emma Duchane recalled in 1997 that Nash always, from their earliest acquaintance, which dated back to Nash and Alicia’s courtship, told interminable stories with mysterious, off-key punch lines.
⁶

In his game-theory course, Nash behaved like his usual self, according to students who were in the class.
⁷
On the first day, he said to the class, “The question occurs to me: Why are you here?,” a remark that caused one student to drop the course. Later, he gave a midterm without announcing it in advance. He also paced a great deal and he sometimes fell into reveries in the middle of lecturing or answering a student’s question. Just before Thanksgiving, Nash had invited his TA from the game theory course, Ramesh Gangolli, and Alberto Galmarino, a student
from the course whom he was helping to choose a dissertation topic, to accompany him on a walk.
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As they walked over the Harvard Bridge on the Charles River late one afternoon, Nash embarked on a lengthy monologue that was difficult to follow for the two, who had just come to the United States. It concerned threats to world peace and calls for world government. Nash seemed to be confiding in the two young men, hinting that he had been asked to play some extraordinary role. Gangolli recalled that he and Galmarino were quite disturbed and that they wondered briefly if they should inform Martin that something was not quite right. Awed as they were by Nash, and new as they were to America — and so reluctant to form any judgments — they decided to say nothing.

Also around that time, Atle Selberg, one of the masters of analytic number theory, gave a talk in Cambridge. Nash, who was in the audience, seemed to think that Selberg knew some secret that he was holding back. Selberg recalled, “He asked some questions I thought were in a sense, to my way of thinking, somewhat inappropriate to the subject. He seemed to see something quite different than what I had intended… . [His] questions were formulated as if I had some hidden, not fully disclosed, agenda that he wanted to discover. The lecture was about the rigidity of several locally symmetric spaces. He asked some questions that seemed to imply I had a hidden, secret motive. He suspected it had something to do with the Riemann Hypothesis, which of course it did not. I was rather taken aback. This was something that had nothing to do whatsoever [with the Riemann Hypothesis].”
⁹

After the New Year’s party, people around the department started talking about Nash. Classes resumed January 4. A week or ten days later, Nash asked Galmarino to teach a couple of his classes. He was going away, he said. Galmarino, who was flattered by Nash’s confidence in him, readily agreed. Nash showed up at Rota’s apartment on Sacramento Street on his way out of town. Then he disappeared.
¹⁰

Cohen disappeared at around the same time. After a few days, the scuttlebutt among the graduate students was that Nash and Cohen had run away together.
¹¹
As it happens Cohen had gone to visit his sister. He was terribly upset when he returned to hear what the others had been saying about him and Nash. Nash, meanwhile, had driven south, ultimately to Roanoke, but perhaps also to Washington, D.C.

A couple of weeks later Nash slouched into the common room. Nobody bothered to stop talking. Nash was holding a copy of
The New York Times.
Without addressing anyone in particular, he walked up to Hartley Rogers and some others and pointed to the story on the upper left-hand corner of the
Times
front page, the off-lede, as
Times
staffers call it.
¹²
Nash said that abstract powers from outer space, or perhaps it was foreign governments, were communicating with him through
The New York Times.
The messages, which were meant only for him, were encrypted and required close analysis. Others couldn’t decode the messages. He was
being allowed to share the secrets of the world. Rogers and the others looked at each other. Was he joking?

Emma Duchane recalled driving with Nash and Alicia. She recalled that “he kept shifting from station to station. We thought he was just being pesky. But he thought that they were broadcasting messages to him. The things he did were mad, but we didn’t really know it.”
¹³

Nash gave one of his graduate students an expired license, writing the student’s nickname — St. Louis — over his own. He called it an “intergalactic driver’s license.” He mentioned that he was a member of a committee and that he was putting the student in charge of Asia. The student recalled, “He seemed to be joking around.”
¹⁴
His manner took on a certain furtiveness. Another student, an undergraduate, recalled, “I have this impression of him darting about. I’d walk into a stairwell and he’d disappear as if he’d been lurking there.”
¹⁵

Nash showed up at the apartment of John and Karin Tate one evening. Everybody was horsing around and finally they settled down to play a game of bridge. Nash’s partner was Karin Tate. His bidding was bizarre. At one point he bid six hearts when, as it turned out, he held no hearts at all. Karin asked him, “Are you crazy?” Nash responded quite calmly, explaining that he somehow had expected her to read his bids. “He expected me to understand. He genuinely thought I could understand. I thought he was pulling my leg, but it became obvious that he wasn’t. I thought he was doing some sort of experiment.”
¹⁶
Some people continued to think Nash was engaged in some elaborate private joke. There was a lot of discussion about it.

Nash’s recollections of those weeks focus on a feeling of mental exhaustion and depletion, recurring and increasingly pervasive images, and a growing sense of revelation regarding a secret world that others around him were not privy to. He began, he recalled in 1996, to notice men in red neckties around the MIT campus. The men seemed to be signaling to him. “I got the impression that other people at MIT were wearing red neckties so I would notice them. As I became more and more delusional, not only persons at MIT but people in Boston wearing red neckties [would seem significant to me].”
¹⁷
At some point, Nash concluded that the men in red ties were part of a definite pattern. “Also [there was some relation to] a crypto-communist party,” he said in 1996.

Things started happening fast. Alicia Nash later compared Nash’s disintegration to that of a man who is conversing quite normally at a dinner party, suddenly starts arguing loudly, and finally has an all-out temper tantrum.
¹⁸

He told Cohen: “People are talking about me. You’ve heard them. Tell me what they’re saying.” Cohen recalled: “It had a nasty edge. I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about, that I hadn’t heard anything.”
¹⁹

Nash was still working on the Riemann problem. Once Nash accused Cohen of rifling through his trash can. Was he trying to steal Nash’s ideas about Riemann? Again, it sounded like a bit of an over-the-top joke, but it upset Cohen sufficiently so that he repeated the incident to a student.
²⁰