A Beautiful Mind (65 page)

Nash was clearly among the majority of those with schizophrenia who benefited from traditional antipsychotics. These drugs were the only ones available between 1952 and 1988, when the more effective Clozapine arrived on the scene.
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’

Peter Newman, an economist at Johns Hopkins, was editing a volume of important contributions to mathematical economics. He wanted to include Nash’s NAS note on Nash equilibrium.

The first problem was finding him. I found him teaching or something at a small women’s college near Roanoke. I wrote to him there to ask his permission to reprint the article. What I got back was an envelope on which my address was written in different-colored crayons. There was also a list of “yous” in different languages: Du, Vous, You, etc., and a plea for universal brotherhood. There was nothing inside the envelope at all. I then asked the in-house editor at the Johns Hopkins Press to call Nash. He did and he said it was the strangest telephone conversation he’d ever had in his life. Then we tried Solomon Lefschetz, since he was the one who sponsored the note. Calling Lefschetz wasn’t easy either. Lefschetz only said, “Ah yes. He is not what he was.” So I had to give it up. Later, when the book was reviewed, reviewers chided me for not including the Nash equilibrium.
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•  •  •

Nash was constantly fearful that Martha and Virginia would hospitalize him again. As he said in one letter, “It is the mechanism of how all the persons involved would collaborate in hospitalizing me which endangers me and which I fear.”
³⁵

Most letters from this period end with a paragraph like the following:

Let me beg (humbly) of U that U will favor the view that I ought to be guarded against the danger of hospitalization in the mental hospital (involuntarily or “falsely”), … simply for personal intellectual survival as a “conscious” and “reasonably conscientious” human being … and “good memory retention.”
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For Virginia, Nash’s illness was something that Martha later called, in her tactful and understated way, “a private sorrow.”
³⁷
Virginia never talked about it with the few acquaintances she had in Roanoke, mostly people she had met playing bridge, and only rarely with Martha. Her friends couldn’t possibly have understood what it was like for her. It was also a practical nightmare. Nash was making so many long-distance telephone calls that Virginia had to put a lock on her phone.

Martha, whose second child was born in 1969, was at least angry. “It was so frustrating day by day. You wondered, is this ever going to get any better?” She realized, at least, that Roanoke was not a kind environment. “Only one time did I ask for help,” recalled Martha. “The minister stopped me after church and told me I should be helping my mother more. He didn’t ask whether I needed help. Later on I called and asked would he come to call. He didn’t come. The retired minister came but he wasn’t the one I wanted.”

Virginia and Nash were nearly evicted from their apartment at one point. Martha’s voice is still full of outrage thirty years later. There had been a fire that started in the incinerator. Nash was home at the time. He called the fire department. “The landlord accused John of setting it,” Martha recalled. He had talked to the neighbors, who were up in arms. They found this large, strange man who walked around the grounds of the apartment complex alarming. It was only by begging that Martha was able to convince the landlord to let Virginia and Nash move back in.

Virginia died shortly before Thanksgiving in 1969. Afterward Nash was sure there was something sinister about her death. He also felt that perhaps he had done wrong by going to the corner store to buy her whiskey. Martha recalled, “When Mother died, it was not a good time. We weren’t close. He felt threatened. He felt that I would put him in a hospital.”

At this point, Eleanor got a court order to force Nash to continue child-support payments. When his money had run out, Virginia had taken over the payments. She also left small legacies for both her grandsons.

Nash then lived briefly with Martha and Charlie, but Martha found it impossible to cope with her brother. “Once Mother was gone, I couldn’t clean with him in my home. I was here with the children and he’s wandering around drinking tea and whistling. He’d take ideas and twist them into something strange.”

Martha arranged to have Nash committed right after Christmas:

After Mother died, I was afraid he’d leave town. I was hoping to get the hospital to appoint a committee so he could get Social Security and also get it for his son.

We went to a judge. We got a court order. The court sent the police to pick him up. We had my mother’s lawyer, Leonard Muse. You could get someone committed for observation. You didn’t have to establish anything very drastic. In the hospital they decided whether to keep somebody. De Jarnette decided that John had paranoid ideas but that he was capable of maintaining himself.

Nash was released from Dejarnette State Sanitorium in Staunton, Virginia, in February. He wrote a final letter to Martha, breaking off all relations with her because of her role in his hospitalization. Then he boarded a bus for Princeton.

45
Phantom of Fine Hall
Princeton, 1970s

Much Madness is divinest Sense — To a discerning Eye… .

— E
MILY
D
ICKINSON,
Number 435

A
N IMPERSONAL NEW GRANITE-CLAD TOWER,
built with defense dollars at the height of the Vietnam War, had replaced the old Fine Hall and neighboring Jadwin Hall.
¹
Math and physics majors spent most of their waking hours below ground where the architects had situated the library — which had formerly occupied the highest floor of Old Fine — as well as the new computer center. Within a few days or weeks, the embryo scientist or mathematician would discover “a very peculiar, thin, silent man walking the halls, night and day,” “with sunken eyes and a sad, immobile face.”
²
On rare occasions, they might catch a glimpse of the wraith — usually clad in khaki pants, plaid shirt, and bright red high-top Keds — printing painstakingly on one of the numerous blackboards that lined the subterranean corridors linking Jadwin and New Fine.
³
More often, students would emerge from an 8:00
A.M
. lecture to find an enigmatic epistle written the night before: “Mao Tse-Tung’s Bar Mitzvah was 13 years, 13 months and 13 days after Brezhnev’s circumcision,” for example.
⁴
Or “I agree with Harvard: There is a brain flat.”
⁵
Or a letter from Nikita Khrushchev to Moses with arcane mathematical statements involving the factoring of very long, ten- to fifteen-digit numbers into two large primes.
⁶
“Nobody knew where they came from,” recalled Mark Reboul, who graduated in 1977. “Nobody knew what they meant.”
⁷

Eventually, some sophomore or junior would clue in the newcomer that the author of the messages, aka the Phantom, was a mathematical genius who had “flipped” while giving a lecture; while trying to solve an impossibly difficult problem; after discovering that someone else had scooped him on a major result; or upon learning that his wife had fallen in love with a mathematical rival.
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He had friends in high places at the university, the older student would add. Students were not to bother him.
⁹

Among the students, the Phantom was often held up as a cautionary figure:
Anybody who was too much of a grind or who lacked social graces was warned that he or she was “going to wind up like the Phantom.”
¹⁰
Yet if a new student complained that having him around made him feel uncomfortable, he was immediately warned: “He was a better mathematician than you’ll ever be!”
¹¹

Few students ever exchanged a word with the Phantom, although some of the brasher ones occasionally bummed a cigarette or asked for a light, for the Phantom was now a heavy smoker. One new physics student once erased two or three of the messages only to encounter the Phantom in front of the blackboard writing a few days later, “sweating, trembling, and practically crying.” The student never erased another.
¹²

Students and young faculty members studied the Phantom’s messages and sometimes copied them down verbatim. The messages created an aura around the Phantom and confirmed the legends of his genius. Frank Wilczek, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study who lives in Einstein’s old house on Mercer Street, was an assistant professor at the university at the time. He remembered feeling “intrigued and impressed” and “in the presence of a great mind.”
¹³
Mark Schneider, a physics professor at Grinnell who was a graduate student in 1979, recalled: “We all found the remarkable connections, level of detail, and breadth of knowledge … exceptional, which is why I … collected a few dozen of the best of these.”
¹⁴

Shortly after Hironaka won a Fields prize for his brilliant proof of the resolution of singularities, one of Nash’s messages read:

N
⁵
+ I
⁵
+ X
⁵
+ O
^s
+ N
⁵
= 0

Can Hironaka resolve this singularity?
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Some of the messages seemed purely mathematical, at least until one looked at them more closely, as in this 1979 message:

Open Letter to Prof. Heisuke Hironaka

The above algebraic variety of dimension 6, represented in affine 7–space is singular, having a point singularity at the origin (0,0,0,0,0,0,0) of the coordinates.

The question is: How singular comparatively, is the above 6-variety, that is, what is the comparative degree of its singularity, compared with other singularities of such a sort as to provide standards of comparison?
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Others contained indirect references to past events:

Indian Limbo

B = (RX)
⁷
+ (MO)
⁶
+ (OP)
⁵
+ (QU)
⁴
+ (ME)
³
+ (OT)
²
+ AAP

OT suggests “Occupational Therapy” - as in Dr. O.T. Beetle, M.D.

AAP = P R (2) - 1, as a number.
¹⁷

And still others were slyly humorous:

True or False Question

Statement: President Jimmy Carter is suffering from the disease of xanthochromatosis, the same disease which previously affected the careers of Nixon and Agnew, so that the disease has presumably jumped the gap of the apparently immune northern republicans Ford and Rockefeller and reinfected Air Force One via the person of Jimmy Carter.

The above statement is true.

The above statement is false.
¹⁸

During one period, all the messages featured a commentator named Ya Ya Fontana who made mysterious pronouncements about current events, principally in the Middle East.
¹⁹
In another period, Alexandre Grothendieck’s name appeared frequently.
²⁰
In still another, Diophantine equations — equations like
x
ⁿ
+ y
ⁿ
= z
ⁿ
— dominated.
²¹

Margaret Wertheim, author of
Pythagoras’ Trousers,
a history of mathematics, has pointed out that “people look to the order of numbers when the world falls apart.”
²²
Nash’s romance with numerology blossomed when his world was falling apart, suggesting once again that delusions — like “mystical, cultic religious efflorescence” — aren’t merely the ravings of madmen but conscious, painstaking, and often desperate attempts to make sense out of chaos.

Nash was making up numbers out of names and was often extremely worried about what he found. “He was quite agitated when he thought that the numbers were portents of something serious,” recalled Peter Cziffra, the head librarian at Fine Hall. Hale Trotter, a mathematician on the Princeton faculty, recalled, “I’d say hello and he’d initiate a conversation. I remember one in which he was very concerned about the similarity of the telephone number of the United States Senate and the telephone number of the Kremlin. He was doing the arithmetic correctly but the reasoning for it was crazy.”
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