What’s John Nash’s real story? We first met him, as he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994. Then we met him a little more in the film “A Brilliant Mind”, which was based on a book of the same name and revealed the extraordinary trajectory of this mathematical genius.
John Forbes Nash was born on June 13, 1928, in a small town in the state of Virginia, United States. As a child he showed an introverted character and did not have many social skills. So he had a lonely childhood and adolescence. I didn’t play much with the other kids, but I was very curious about the books. John Nash’s mother, far from crumbing him, encourages him to cultivate his intellect.
- Contrary to what one might think.
- And like many other geniuses.
- John Nash did not stand out for his grades at school.
- His lack of aptitude in school was so great that many teachers even doubted his intellectual ability.
- Some have even suggested a slight delay.
- Despite all this.
- Nash enjoyed doing scientific experiments on the privacy of his room.
“People always sell the idea that people with mental illness suffer. I think madness can be an escape. If things aren’t going well, you may want to think of something better. “John Nash-
As a teenager, John Nash became interested in mathematics, but especially chemistry. They say he was involved in the manufacture of explosives that they mistakenly detonated and caused death at the school he attended.
In 1945, Nash won a scholarship to enter the Institute of Technology and was to study chemical engineering. But the head of the math department, John Synge, convinced him to specialize in numbers. In 1948, he graduated as a mathematician and received a scholarship to Princeton for graduate studies.
In 1949, while preparing for his doctorate, Nash wrote the article with which he won the Nobel Prize nearly 50 years later. The title of his thesis was “Non-Cooperative Games”. He then began working at RAND Corporation, an institution that studied scientists relevant to the Cold War. Two years later, he began working as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Until then, everything is similar to what was told in the film, but from there John Nash’s true story is different from the one featured on screen, John Nash had an illegitimate son with Eleanor Stier, which caused a big scandal in His family. Soon after, his father died; In addition, in 1954, Nash was arrested during an operation to expel homosexuals, so he was fired from his job.
In 1957, Nash married Alicia Larde, a student of Salvadoran descent. They had a son, but just before he was born, they divorced. Nash was suffering from schizophrenia and Alicia couldn’t stand it. Since then, Nash embarked on a journey through Europe, where he tried to obtain political refugee status.
He never had visual hallucinations, but he did have auditory hallucinations. He thought he was an elected official, a religious figure. At the same time, he felt that there was a conspiracy orchestrated by the Soviet Union and the Vatican against him. “I started hearing something like phone calls ringing in my brain, people who were contrary to my ideas,” he said.
John Nash found his reason in a way that many considered a miracle, this occurred after eight hospitalizations in various mental health centers and after being subjected to a high dose of medication, in addition to aggressive treatments such as electroshock therapy, according to his own testimony. At some point in his life, he stopped paying attention to the voices he heard.
This math genius once stopped taking the drugs he had been prescribed, in an interview with Xavi Ayén he said there comes a time when drugs are more harmful than good, but to be able to stop taking it you have to be very careful. because it’s a dangerous thing. However, he gave up treatment and, a few years later, became cured.
Alicia, his ex-wife, with whom he lived again for some time after getting sick, claims that in Nash’s case there has been no miracle and said that “it is about living a life in peace. “
In 1996, the president of the Felice Lieh Mak World Psychiatric Association described Nash as “a symbol of hope, an explorer of an unlimited universe, the universe of the human mind. “The most comforting yet intriguing thing is that John Nash’s true story is proof that schizophrenia is not a reason to necessarily mark the end of a life, at the same time, it is a stimulant for people looking for more effective therapies.