Ron Howard

A Beautiful Mind

Producer: Brian Grazer und Todd Hallowell

Watched: 2003

The story of John Nash's life has a similar fascination as that of Lance Armstrong or Jesus Christ: that of some kind of almost supernatural resurrection.

As a young Ph.D. student and postdoc, Nash did some breakthrough work in a field he wasn't really interested in, but his supervisor pointed him to: in game theory, one of the mathematical foundations of economics. People already saw him on track for a Fields medal, which has a similar meaning in mathematics as a Nobel prize has in the sciences. Then, his behaviour began to become stranger and stranger, his productivity declined, and he was forcibly hospitalised: he was suffering from schizophrenia.

Treatment for mental illnesses in the 1960s was experimental and crude at best, and he was subjected to some horrible and ineffective therapies. Medication then brought mental stability to him, but stunted his brillant mind (which didn't work too well with him as a madman either).

While that happened, Nash's results became one of the most important results in theoretical economics, known as the Nash equilibrium.

Then, the miracle happened: John Nash turned sane again. And finally, for the discovery of the Nash equilibrium, he was awarded the Nobel prize for economics.

The movie, however, is not a truthful representation of Nash's life. It omits all the nasty parts - Nash wasn't really a nice person in his young years, and neither is he now, as a mentally sane old man. It doesn't mention that Nash has a son, who is also a mathematician, and also spent years in an asylum for having schizophrenia. It also falsely depicts the symptom of schizophrenia as hallucinations of non-existent people, whose non-existence can be rationally deduced. In reality, it isn't that simple. In that way, he is depicted like a storybook madman.

The visual explanation of Nash's discovery, however, was a nice and funny scene involving 5 pretty girls and 4 guys preventing each other from having any success with the girls.

Otherwise, I'd recommend to read the book of the same name instead.

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