A Beautiful Mind (8 page)

Adolescence wasn’t easy for an intellectually precocious boy with few social skills or athletic interests to help him blend in with his small-town peers. The boys and girls on Country Club Hill let him tag along when they went hiking in the woods, explored caves, and hunted bats.
⁴⁴
But they found him — his speech, his behavior, the knapsack he insisted on carrying — weird.
⁴⁵
“He was teased more than average — simply because he was so far out,” Donald V. Reynolds, who lived across the street from the Nashes, said. “What he thought of as experimenting, we thought of as crazy. We called him Big Brains.”
⁴⁶
Once some boys in the neighborhood
tricked him into a boxing match and he took a beating.
⁴⁷
But because he was tall, strong, and physically courageous, the teasing only rarely degenerated into outright bullying. He rarely passed up a chance to prove that he was smarter, stronger, braver.

Boredom and simmering adolescent aggression led him to play pranks, occasionally ones with a nasty edge. He caricatured classmates he disliked with weird little cartoons. He later told a fellow mathematician at MIT that, as a youngster, he had sometimes “enjoyed torturing animals.”
⁴⁸
He once constructed a Tinkertoy rocking chair, wired it electrically, and tried to get Martha to sit in it.
⁴⁹
He played a similar prank on a neighboring child. Nelson Walker, head of Bluefield’s Chamber of Commerce, told a newspaper reporter the following story:

I was a couple of years younger than Johnny. One day I was walking by his house on Country Club Hill and he was sitting on the front steps. He called for me to come over and touch his hands. I walked over to him, and when I touched his hands, I got the biggest shock I’d ever gotten in my life. He had somehow rigged up batteries and wires behind him, so that he wouldn’t get shocked but when I touched his hands, I got the living fire shocked out of me. After that he just smiled and I went on my way.
⁵⁰

Occasionally the pranks got him into hot water. One incident involving a small explosion in the high school chemistry lab landed him in the principal’s office.
⁵¹
Another time, he and some other boys were picked up by the police for a curfew violation.
⁵²

When he was fifteen, Nash and a couple of boys from across the street, Donald Reynolds and Herman Kirchner, began fooling around with homemade explosives.
⁵³
They gathered in Kirchner’s basement, which they called their “laboratory,” where they made pipe bombs and manufactured their own gunpowder. They constructed cannons out of pipe and shot stuff through them. Once they managed to shoot a candle through a thick wooden board. One day Nash showed up at the lab holding a beaker. “I’ve just made some nitroglycerin,” he announced excitedly. Donald didn’t believe him. He told him “to go down to Crystal Rock and throw it over the cliff to see what would happen.” Nash did just that. “Luckily,” said Reynolds, “it didn’t work. He would have blown off the whole side of the mountain.” The bombmaking came to a horrifying end one afternoon in January 1944. Herman Kirchner, who was alone at the time, was building yet another pipe bomb when it exploded in his lap, severing an artery. He bled to death in the ambulance that came for him. Donald Reynolds’s parents packed him off to boarding school the following fall. For Nash, whose parents may or may not have known the extent of his involvement in the bombmaking, it was a sobering experience that brought home the dangers of his experiments.

He had grown up, essentially, without ever making a close friend. Just as he learned to deflect his parents’ criticism of his behavior with his intellectual achievements,
he learned to armor himself against rejection by adopting a hard shell of indifference and using his superior intelligence to strike back. Julia Robinson, the first woman to become president of the American Mathematical Society, said in her autobiography that she believed that many mathematicians felt themselves to be ugly ducklings as children, unlovable and out of kilter with their more conventional, conforming peers.
⁵⁴
Johnny’s apparent sense of superiority, his standoffishness, and his occasional cruelty were ways of coping with uncertainty and loneliness. What he lost by his lack of genuine interaction with children his own age was a “lively sense, in reality, of his actual position in the human hierarchy” that prevents other children with more social contact from feeling either unrealistically weak or unrealistically powerful.
⁵⁵
If he could not believe he was lovable, then feeling powerful was a good substitute. As long as he could be successful, his self-esteem could remain intact.

Johnny chose the time-honored escape route from the confines of small-town life: He performed well in school. With Virginia’s encouragement, he took courses at Bluefield College. He read voraciously, mostly futuristic fantasy books, popular science magazines, and real science texts.
⁵⁶
“He was just an outstanding problem solver,” his high school chemistry teacher later told the
Bluefield Daily Telegraph.
“When I put a chemistry problem up on the blackboard, all the students would get out a pencil and a piece of paper. John wouldn’t move. He would stare at the formula on the board, then stand up politely and tell us the answer. He could do it all in his head. He never even took out a pencil or a piece of paper.”
⁵⁷
This youthful Gedanken experimentation actually helped shape the way he approached mathematical problems later on. His peers became more respectful. At a time when the war was making heroes out of scientists, Johnny’s classmates assumed he was slated to become one.
⁵⁸

In high school, Nash became friendly — though not close friends — with a couple of fellow students, John Williams and John Louthan, both sons of Bluefield College professors. The three rode a public bus to school together and Johnny helped Williams with Latin translations. Williams recalled, “We were attracted to him. He was an interesting guy. That was sort of it. I don’t think we ever went over to John’s house. It was pretty much of a school thing.”
⁵⁹
The three also constantly maneuvered to get out of their classes as much as possible. Before the widespread use of the SATs, college recruiters routinely came to the high school and would invite students to take their admissions tests. “We spent many mornings taking those tests,” Williams said.

At the beginning of the year, at Johnny’s instigation, they made a bet — no one remembers for how much — that they could make the honor roll without ever cracking a book. All three thought they were pretty smart but at the same time were contemptuous of grinds and teachers’ pets. “We kind of got drug into it by Nash,” Williams said. Nash, who was already taking a full load of courses at
Bluefield College, never made the honor society, missing it by a few tenths of a percent. The other two did, though by a hair.

John Sr. suggested that Johnny apply to West Point, a suggestion that, once again, may have reflected the father’s anxiety that his son was not growing up well-rounded as much as it did the prospect of free college tuition. But as Martha said, “Even I could see that wouldn’t have worked.”
⁶⁰
Whatever fantasies he may have had about becoming a scientist, when asked to describe his career aspirations in an essay, Johnny wrote that he hoped to become an engineer like his father.
⁶¹
He and John Sr. wrote an article together describing an improved method for calculating the proper tensions for electric cables and wires — a project that entailed weeks of field measurements — and published the results jointly in an engineering journal.
⁶²
Johnny entered the George Westinghouse competition and won a full scholarship, one often that were awarded nationally.
⁶³
The fact that Lloyd Shapley, a son of the famous Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, also won a Westinghouse that year made the achievement all the sweeter in the eyes of the Nash family. Johnny was accepted at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. Because of the war all colleges were on accelerated schedules and operated year-round so that students could graduate in three years. Johnny left Bluefield for Pittsburgh, taking a train from nearby Hinton, in mid-June, a few weeks before the VE Day parade celebrating Hitler’s defeat.

2
Carnegie Institute of Technology
June 1945–June 1948

In those days very few people became mathematicians. It was like becoming a concert pianist.

— R
AOUL
B
OTT
, 1995

N
ASH WENT TO
P
ITTSBURGH
to become a chemical engineer, but his growing interest was in mathematics. It was not long before he abandoned the laboratory and slide rule for Möbius knots and Diophantine equations.
¹

With its smelters, power plants, polluted rivers, and ubiquitous slag heaps, Pittsburgh was a city of violent strikes and frequent floods.
²
So dense was the sulfurous haze that engulfed its downtown that travelers arriving by rail often mistook morning for midnight. The Carnegie Institute of Technology, perched halfway up Squirrel Hill, hardly escaped the inferno. The ivory-colored brick of its buildings — designed, or so students said, to serve as factories should Andrew Carnegie’s school fail — were glazed yellow black. Its walkways were gritty with soot particles the size of pebbles. Its students were forced, before a lecture was half over, to brush the cinders from their lecture notes. Even at high noon in midsummer, one could stare directly at the sun without blinking.

In that era, Carnegie was shunned by the local ruling elite, which sent its children east to Harvard and Princeton. Richard Cyert, who joined the Carnegie faculty after the war and would later become its president, recalled, “When I came this place was really very backward.”
³
The engineering school, with its two thousand or so students, still resembled the trade school for sons and daughters of electricians and bricklayers that it had been at the turn of the century.

But like so many other colleges right after the war, Carnegie was changing. Robert Doherty, its president, had seized the opportunities created by wartime research to turn the engineering school into a real university. He parlayed defense contracts and the prospect of ballooning enrollments into a big push to recruit brilliant young researchers in math, physics, and economics. “The theoretical
sciences were being pushed very hard,” recalled Richard Duffin, a mathematician. “Doherty was trying to take CT into the big time.”
⁴

Corporate giants like Westinghouse, whose headquarters were in Pittsburgh, supplied generous scholarships to lure talented young people to Carnegie. Among the scholarship recipients who entered Carnegie in 1945 were talented youngsters like Andy Warhol, the artist, as well as a group of young men who would eventually, like Nash, shun engineering for science and mathematics.
⁵

Nash arrived by train in June 1945; gasoline rationing made car travel impractical.
⁶
Carnegie Tech was still operating in wartime mode: classes went year-round, most campus activities remained canceled, and most of the fraternity houses were still shut. Within a year the campus would be inundated with veterans and classes would be jammed with these older students. But that June, two months before the war finally ended, it was mostly freshmen and sophomores who were on campus. The scholarship students were housed together in Welch Hall and took most of their classes together — small ones taught by hand-picked instructors, some of whom were first-rate. Nash took his first physics course from Immanuel Estermann, for example, a top-flight physicist who had done much of the experimental work that had netted Otto Stern, a German ómigró, the 1943 Nobel Prize for physics.
⁷

Nash’s engineering aspirations did not survive his first semester, killed off by an unhappy experience in mechanical drawing: “I reacted negatively to the regimentation,” he later wrote.
⁸
But chemistry, his newly chosen major, proved no better suited to his temperament or interests. He worked briefly as a lab assistant for one of his teachers but got into trouble for breaking equipment.
⁹
He was so bored at his summer job at the Westinghouse Lab that he spent most of his two months there making and polishing a brass egg in the lab’s machine shop.
¹⁰
The final blow was a C in physical chemistry, which he got after a running dispute with the professor over the lack of rigor of the mathematics in the course. David Lide recalled, “He refused to do the problems the way the professor expected.”
¹¹
Of chemistry in general Nash would complain: “It was not a matter of how well one could think … but of how well one could handle a pipette and perform titration in the laboratory.”
¹²

Even as he struggled in the laboratory, Nash was already discovering a brilliant group of newcomers to Carnegie. By his sophomore year, Doherty’s program of upgrading the theoretical sciences had brought to Carnegie John Synge, nephew of the Irish playwright John Millington Synge, who became head of the mathematics department. Despite his startling appearance — Synge wore a black patch over one eye and a filter that protruded from one of his nostrils — he was a man of great charm who attracted younger scholars like Richard Duffin, Raoul Bott, and Alexander Weinstein, a European emigre whom Einstein had once invited to become a
collaborator.
¹³
When Albert Tucker, a Princeton topologist who did pathbreaking work in operations research, came to Carnegie to lecture that year, he was so impressed with the depth of mathematical talent at Carnegie that he confessed that he felt as if he were “bringing coals to Newcastle.”
¹⁴