A Beautiful Mind (71 page)

When Weibull walked into the paneled room, introductions were hardly necessary. As a member of Sweden’s small academic elite, Weibull already knew the five men, mostly academics, sitting around the enormous table. He was nonetheless slightly awed, realizing from the committee’s questions that he was being given the opportunity to participate at the earliest stage of a historic decision. “My impression … [was] that it was the first time that the committee had met to consider this.”
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Weibull presented a verbal summary of his report, telling the committee about the central ideas in game theory, their importance for economic research, and the
key contributors. He, too, had placed Nash at the top of his list of half a dozen seminal thinkers.

The committee’s questions were carefully phrased to hide the members’ own opinions, and focused, in the first session, on whether game theory was just a fad or really an important tool for investigating a wide range of interesting economic problems. By the second meeting, however, Lindbeck, the committee chairman, zeroed in on Nash. Was what Nash did merely mathematics? Lindbeck asked. Did he simply formalize ideas that economists had formulated at least a hundred years earlier? Was it true that Nash had stopped doing research in game theory in the early 1950s? That question was the closest anyone came to mentioning the subject of Nash’s mental illness.
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When Weibull left the meeting, he thought that there was a good chance that the committee would eventually agree to award a prize in game theory, but he had no reason, given Nash’s illness and the decades that had passed since his early papers, to believe that Nash would make the cut.

Eric Fisher, a visitor at Stockholm University’s Institute for International Economics that year, recalled being quizzed by Assar Lindbeck about Nash’s mental state. Fisher had been an undergraduate at Princeton, where he used to see Nash hanging out in the foyer of Firestone Library. Lindbeck wanted to know whether Nash was “competent enough to handle the publicity that winning [a Nobel] might entail.”
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It was two years later, the fall of 1989, that Weibull hurried across the Princeton University campus to meet Nash for the first time.
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After weeks of delicate negotiation, with the chairman of the mathematics department acting as a go-between, the elusive mathematician had finally agreed to have lunch. Weibull had a specific motive for the meeting. Lindbeck had pulled him aside shortly before his departure from Sweden and asked him to report back to him on Nash’s mental state. There was some talk, Lindbeck said, that Nash had some sort of remission and was behaving quite reasonably. Was it true? Weibull was about to find out.

Weibull knew instantly that the tall, white-haired, frail-looking man standing in the driveway in front of Prospect House, Princeton’s Florentine faculty club, was Nash. He was standing there rather awkwardly, smoking, looking down at the ground, obviously dressed up for the occasion, wearing white tennis shoes but also a long-sleeved dress shirt and long pants. As Weibull drew nearer, he could see that Nash was deathly nervous. When Weibull gave him his ready, friendly smile and extended his hand, Nash was unable to meet his eye and, after the briefest of handshakes, instantly put his hand back into his pocket.

They ate, not in the main, formal restaurant, but downstairs in a small cafeteria. Weibull, a gentle, soft-spoken man, asked Nash questions about his work. Sometimes the conversation took odd turns. When Weibull asked Nash about refining the Nash equilibrium concept by, perhaps, taking into account irrational moves by players, Nash answered him by talking, not about irrationality, but about
immortality. But on the whole, Nash struck Weibull as no more eccentric, irrational, or paranoid than many other academics. Weibull learned interesting details about Nash’s game theory papers that he hadn’t known. Nash had gotten his idea for the bargaining solution as an undergraduate at Carnegie Tech by thinking about trade agreements between nations. While he had used both Brouwer’s and Kakutani’s fixed-point theorems to prove his equilibrium result, he still thought that the proof relying on Brouwer was both more beautiful and more apt. He said that von Neumann had opposed his idea of equilibrium, but that Tucker had supported him.

Afterward, though, what stood out for Weibull about the meeting, and the thing that transformed him that day from a detached observer and objective informant into an ardent advocate, was something Nash said before they walked into the club. “Can I go in?” Nash had asked uncertainly. “I’m not faculty.” That this great, great man did not feel that he had a right to eat in the faculty club struck Weibull as an injustice that demanded remedy.

By the summer of 1993, rumors about a possible prize in game theory were rampant.
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A very small, very select symposium on game theory had taken place in mid-June, at what used to be Alfred Nobel’s old dynamite factory in Bjorkborn, a few hundred kilometers north of Stockholm.
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Such symposia, sponsored by the prize committee, are invariably seen as Nobel beauty contests. This one was organized by Karl-Göran Mäler with the help of Jorgen Weibull and a Cambridge economist, Partha Dasgupta. Lindbeck, who was spending the spring term in Cambridge, oversaw the preparations by telephone. The dozen or so invited speakers represented two generations of leading game-theory researchers, mostly theorists and experimentalists, among them John Harsanyi, Reinhard Selten, Robert Aumann, David Kreps, Ariel Rubinstein, Al Roth, Paul Milgrom, and Eric Maskin. The topic? Rationality and Equilibrium in Strategic Interaction.

Most of the participants took it for granted that they were performing for the benefit of the prize committee and assumed that the three graybeards in the group, Harsanyi, Selten, and Aumann, were the likely Laureates.
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Aumann, the white-bearded Israeli dean of game theory, was strutting around “as if he had already won.” Much was made of the choice of topic, which was theoretical and focused on noncooperative as opposed to cooperative games, and those who hadn’t been invited — Nash most obviously, of course.

As it turned out, the prize committee was far from committing itself to a candidate.
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Protestations that the main motivation for the symposium was to create an opportunity for the committee “to educate itself,” as Torsten Persson of the prize committee put it later, were accurate. Only one other prize committee member besides Mäler was even there — and that was Ingemar Stahl. His brother, Ingolf, was one of the speakers, and Ingemar intimated that he had come to hear him. But everyone assumed that he was there to act as a spy for the committee.
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•  •  •

A few weeks later, Harold Kuhn, the professor of mathematics and economics at Princeton University, got an urgent fax from Stockholm. It was from Weibull, who wanted Kuhn to send a number of documents, among them Nash’s Ph.D. thesis and a RAND memorandum — “no later than mid-August please.”
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Weibull also asked Kuhn to get him á transcript of an interview with Nash conducted by Robert Leonard, the historian. Leonard, who had not taped the interview, wrote Kuhn a note in which he said that the request “sent my mind reeling in the Swedish direction.”
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In Stockholm, meanwhile, the prize committee was about to report to the so-called Ninth Class of the academy — all the academy members in the social sciences.
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The bulk of the report, of course, was devoted to the proposed candidates for 1993, two economics historians, Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago and Douglass North of Washington University in St. Louis. But the committee also updated the class on two or three other proposals that constituted the top choices for subsequent prizes. One of them was a prize in game theory; Nash was on the short list of half a dozen candidates.
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Nearly the only point the prize committee had agreed on was that it wanted to go ahead with a prize in game theory in 1994, the fiftieth anniversary of John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s great opus.

Lindbeck and the others were still toying with “every possible configuration” of two and three winners.
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The short list — the candidates that the committee had focused most of its attention on — had scarcely changed since the prize was first conceived.
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Apart from Nash it included Lloyd Shapley, whom Nash had known as a graduate student at Princeton. Shapley was the most direct intellectual descendant of von Neumann and Morgenstern and the clear leader of the field in the 1950s and 1960s when most of the work was in cooperative theory. Reinhard Selten and John Harsanyi, who had elaborated the theory of noncooperative games, were also on it. Harsanyi’s breakthroughs permitted analysis of games of incomplete information while Selten developed a way to discriminate between reasonable and unreasonable outcomes in games. Aumann, who developed the role of common knowledge in games, was also on the list. And Thomas Schelling, who invented the notion of the strategic value of brinkmanship, was being considered because of his broad vision for the application of game theory to the social sciences.

The prize decision is made in stages.
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Each year the committee starts meeting soon after the January 31 deadline for the two hundred or so nominations that the committee solicits from prominent economists around the world. By April, the committee decides on a particular candidate or candidates. In late August, it submits the proposal — along with a document several inches thick that includes the referee reports, publications, and other supporting material — to the Ninth Class for endorsement. The academy then votes on the candidates in early October. But, as everyone involved was well aware, the power truly resides in the committee and,
until recently, in one man, Assar Lindbeck. Löfgren said, “The prize committee meets for a whole year. It’s technically impossible for the higher body to make the decision.”
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Debate in the committee was unusually contentious from the first meeting, attended by Lindbeck, Mäler, Stahl, Persson and Lars Svenson.
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Lindbeck had come to the conclusion that the prize should be for contributions to noncooperative theory alone. These were the ideas that had proved fruitful for economics, “the most important so far,” as Lindbeck later said, adding “cooperative theory has a few interesting applications in economics, but perhaps more in political science.”
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Although Mäler sided with Lindbeck from the start, convincing the rest of the committee was harder than the latter anticipated. “It seemed self-evident afterward. But it took a long time to come to this conclusion. And to convince others.”
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Of course, he later admitted, narrowing the prize down in this way would immediately knock out some of the obvious contenders, namely Shapley and Schelling.
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And here was the real bone of contention: Focusing on noncooperative theory also meant that it would be difficult to deny Nash the prize. “Once we decided to limit the prize to noncooperative theory then it was very easy to decide who were the … [key contributors]. Then it was obvious that Nash is [part of the] Nobel.”
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Lindbeck proposed a three-way prize for the definition of equilibria in non-cooperative games: Nash, Harsanyi, and Selten.
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This was where the debate got nasty.

The person on the committee least intimidated by Lindbeck and best equipped intellectually to challenge him was Ingemar Stahl, a sixty-year-old professor at Lund with a joint appointment in economics and law.
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Stahl is a quick study and a brilliant debater, a man who delights in taking contrarian, often extreme positions, in any debate. He had long been one of the most active committee members and had written many of the committee’s prize proposals since the early 1980s.

Stahl is short, with a large head and a big belly. His detractors call him Zwergel or “little dwarf” behind his back. A onetime wunderkind who never quite lived up to his early promise, Stahl owes the prestigious chair at Lund, his academy membership, and his longtime position on the prize committee more to his political connections and his high-profile posture in public policy debates than to his research output. Like Lindbeck, Stahl began his upward climb early, while he was still in high school, as a protégé of various Social Democratic politicians, including Palme, but he had gone over to the conservative opposition in the late 1960s.

Stahl was deeply and adamantly opposed to awarding the prize to Nash. From the start, he was highly skeptical of game theory — as indeed he is of all pure theory. He is an institutionalist, likes intuitive rather than formal reasoning, and is leery of mathematics and “technicians.” He was, for example, a main mover behind the prizes for James Buchanan in 1986 and Ronald Coase in 1991 — economists whose theories focus on the way governments and legal structures affect the workings of
markets. He also prides himself on grasping Nobel politics. The more he learned about Nash, the less he liked the idea of giving Nash a prize. In particular, he considered giving the prize to Nash the kind of ill-considered gesture that was likely to result in embarrassment and, more important, make the committee look bad.

“I knew he had been ill,” he said later. “I didn’t think many people knew about it. I guess I heard Hörmander’s version.”
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Stahl had done quite a bit of digging. In the early fall, he had made a call to Lars Hörmander, Sweden’s most eminent mathematician and winner of the 1962 Fields Medal.
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Hörmander had just retired from the University of Lund. Stahl identified himself as a member of the Nobel Prize committee. He’d heard that Hörmander had known Nash quite well in the 1950s and 1960s, he said. The committee was thinking of giving Nash a Nobel Prize. Could Hörmander give him the lowdown on Nash?