品牌：
基本信息
·出版社：Simon & Schuster
·页码：464 页码
·出版日：2001年
·ISBN：0743224574
·条码：9780743224574
·版次：2
·装帧：平装
·开本：32开 32开
内容简介
Synopsis:
How could you, a mathematician, believe that extraterrestrials were sending you messages?" the visitor from Harvard asked the West Virginian with the movie-star looks and Olympian manner.
"Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did," came the answer. "So I took them seriously."
Thus begins the true story of John Nash, the mathematical genius who was a legend by age thirty when he slipped into madness, and who — thanks to the selflessness of a beautiful woman and the loyalty of the mathematics community — emerged after decades of ghostlike existence to win a Nobel Prize and world acclaim. The inspiration for a major motion picture, Sylvia Nasar's award-winning biography is a drama about the mystery of the human mind, triumph over incredible adversity, and the healing power of love.
Amazon.com
Stories of famously eccentric Princetonians abound--such as that of chemist Hubert Alyea, the model for The Absent-Minded Professor, or Ralph Nader, said to have had his own key to the library as an undergraduate. Or the "Phantom of Fine Hall," a figure many students had seen shuffling around the corridors of the math and physics building wearing purple sneakers and writing numerology treatises on the blackboards. The Phantom was John Nash, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his generation, who had spiraled into schizophrenia in the 1950s. His most important work had been in game theory, which by the 1980s was underpinning a large part of economics. When the Nobel Prize committee began debating a prize for game theory, Nash's name inevitably came up--only to be dismissed, since the prize clearly could not go to a madman. But in 1994 Nash, in remission from schizophrenia, shared the Nobel Prize in economics for work done some 45 years previously.
Economist and journalist Sylvia Nasar has written a biography of Nash that looks at all sides of his life. She gives an intelligent, understandable exposition of his mathematical ideas and a picture of schizophrenia that is evocative but decidedly unromantic. Her story of the machinations behind Nash's Nobel is fascinating and one of very few such accounts available in print (the CIA could learn a thing or two from the Nobel committees). This highly recommended book is indeed "a story about the mystery of the human mind, in three acts: genius, madness, reawakening."
--Mary Ellen Curtin
Book Dimension
Height (cm) 23.6 Width (cm) 15.6
作者简介
Sylvia Nasar
Sylvia Nasar(born 1947 in Bavaria) is an American journalist and writer. A former economics reporter for the New York Times, she was recently named the Knight Chair in Business Journalism at Columbia University.
She described the life of John Forbes Nash in A Beautiful Mind (Simon & Schuster), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. The book was adapted for the screen in 2001. She is currently writing a book entitled Grand Pursuit.
In 2006, she became embroiled in a controversy over her New Yorker article (co-written with David Gruber), Manifold Destiny.
媒体推荐
Spotlight Reviews
1.a mathematical mind, November 20, 2001
Reviewer: shelley isom (El Cerrito, CA United States)
I generally hate biographies. They are usually heavily loaded with details of no significance while lacking in a larger
meaning, plus most of their subjects wind up dead, thus defeating the purpose of biography (to make living seem
significant) and I wind up depressed by the whole exercise -- life always seems so pointless after reading a biography. I
make two exceptions to this: Boswell's Life of Johnson and this biography (obviously, I don't seek this kind of literary
genre so I realize I may have overlooked a few good ones). This book is less a biography in the usual sense than an
exploration of a human being with a special talent/obsession -- mathematics. Reading this book made me realize that
mathematics is really a branch of art and depends on living on the edge (close to insanity) so as to fish insight from the
chaos just on the other side of rationality. Creativity without danger is worthless.
John Forbes Nash was clearly not a "people" person although there is something appealing about him despite his
arrogance, ambition and vanity -- he is a truth teller, and while we all pretend to admire truth tellers, we always prefer
those who don't go near that cold inhospitable country. That he went mad seemed almost inevitable given the extent of his
ambition and hubris -- he wanted to fish out the biggest of mathematical fish and when he realized that his incapacity for
study and overestimation of his own talent and inspiration meant that his fish had already been landed by other
mathematicians and/or found to be illusory, he chose the lesser of two evils -- insanity. Anything but to become just
another mediocrity. He plunged into numerology (became a kind of numerical visionary) leaving strange little
numerological messages all over Fine Hall which he haunted like a prescient ghost. In his public life, he became an actor
in his own paranoid delusion, traveling here and there, trying to obtain citizenship in one country while forfeiting it in
another, an ad hoc peace broker. Like most paranoiacs, his delusions were solipsistic yet formulaic, following his political
inclinations. At Princeton, people who came across these little bursts of enigmatic enlightenment left on the walls and
blackboards felt moved to write them down. He lived like this for some 30 years, and then for some reason known only
to himself (he explains it as having realized that he could rein in his paranoiac ideation by simply recognizing when he was
beginning to go down that road and turning his thoughts elsewhere). This realization, by the way, puts him way up there in
my estimation. He learned to control his own mind, to make his return to sanity a triumph rather than a sad defeat. He
recognized where the danger lay and learned to avoid it when he wanted to. When he returned to the flatland of reason,
he never turned against his mad self. In fact, he said that his mathematical inspiration came from the same place as his
so-called delusional thinking. (Here's an idea: what if paranoid delusions are not really insane; they only seem so because
each person with these ideas couches them in a personal way, dresses them eccentrically according to whim, and we are
fooled by how silly they look rather than by how consistent they are from one so-called paranoid individual to the next --
maybe there is something out there taking over our minds. Maybe that's why our minds are so limited and getting more so
all the time. We haven't always been this stupid). His winning the Nobel Prize at this late stage was also a proof of his
great personal power. The Nobel Prize committee had deep reservations about the public relations danger of giving a prize to a man who had been publicly insane for 30 years. He won it also not for mathematics but in economics (a hotly debated topic -- many considered economics as a discipline unworthy of a Nobel Prize). The portion of the book about the Nobel Prize is just great. We get a good look at how this system works, how it keeps its equilibrium in the world of high thought and keeps its credibility by not making too many odd/wrong choices. I also liked the speech he gave when accepting it. He had put a great deal of single minded intentionality into winning a great prize and that he won the Nobel seems less a credit to the committee than to this man's indomitable will. At the same time, he had
lived past the sheer need for fame and he received it merely as a token to his young self (for his young self's work in
games theory) and was appreciative that it allowed him to obtain a credit card. I like his aside during his Nobel speech when he parenthetically gave an acknowledgment to his insane self -- his alter ego.
Other oddly mathematical touches in his life: two sons named John. One was illegitimate by a woman who clung to the
hope that Nash would marry her at some point or at least support her and her offspring. He never did. He married a
beauty (a physicist) instead -- Alicia -- and produced another son named John. This John has been diagnosed paranoid
schizophrenic. He had his father's footsteps to follow. In his meetings with this John, Nash sees himself at that age and
tells John not to indulge in insanity. Nash is a man who lived according to his own lights. His was not a social life, yet it is
instructive and it gives hope to people who refuse to conform to the social model. This great biography makes this clear.
2.The Book That Inspired The Movie, December 21, 2001
Reviewer: Francis J. Mcinerney (Commonwealth)
This book draws very sharp divisions between movies that are about a life, based on a life, or in this case, inspired by a life. Whether you have scene the movie or even the trailer, once you read this book it become immediately apparent Dr. Nash's life would not fit into any single film. To a degree this is simply an instance of practicality, for the work this man and his peers did, is intelligible to a small handful of people. Even while reading the book, unless your math skills are somewhat extraordinary, the lexicon of pure math will be completely new, and the concepts these men and women developed are fascinating, however they are almost unimaginably complex.
To those who have read material that may have touched on Game Theory, The Prisoner's Dilemma, and The Mobius Band, the book will allow for moments when the inquisitive can participate. In most cases the concepts are mind bending, and in some cases they could not even be verbalized by some of the brilliant minds that Dr. Nash worked amongst. Ms. Sylvia Nasar does an excellent job of explaining why Dr. Nash was so different from his peers, and how he approached complex issues in fundamentally different manners than others.
The remarkable story is of this brilliant man who was considered one of the greatest thinkers of his time who fell gradually, though fairly quickly, into a mental state that caused his family to commit him more than once. The decades he spent living under the most bizarre and destructive delusions, his moments of clarity, and then his highly unusual recovery makes for an incredible tale. This is one of those stories that had it been written as fiction, it would not have been taken seriously.
The other parts of the book were very revealing as they pertained to Dr. Nash and his peers at Princeton, MIT, and elsewhere. The fields they work in are intensely competitive, however when he began his decline, and then continued to have false starts at normality, for the most part he was not abandoned. The author touches on why his peers may have felt the need to help a man who routinely demonstrated the most hurtful personal behavior to anyone he came in contact with. There were exceptions, but they are very few in number, and not for the people you might suppose. All of these great minds share at least one commonality, and that is their ability to think at extremely high levels that few can even imagine. Many of these people seem to constantly fear the loss of whatever unique gifts they have. They also tend to be people that have been marginalized until they find their place in the academic world, for what they think of, and the eccentricities they often have, single them out for ridicule not praise.
A very readable biography, a profession that is understood by few.
Customer Reviews
1.The next John Nash, 15 Oct 2005
Reviewer: Anon (Europe)
This is information that I believe ought to be know: I am an African American, who received a doctorate in mathematics in 1974. For many years, I have been stalked and black-balled by the CIA, similarly to Prof. Nash in the film. For instance, there are 271 forum visitors online now as I compose this. What really bothers me is that the topic of my Master's thesis was mentioned in the dialogue of the movie drama, without giving me a credit and without indication that the problem had been solved by someone. The movie screenwriter had no right to drag me into the story by referring to my Master's thesis, which was never published. The only good thing I can say is that I became acquainted with some of the work of Prof. Nash, after viewing the film, and discovered.it to be quite interesting.
2.The Hubris of Genius, 9 Jul 2004
Reviewer: C.B.Liddell (Tokyo, Japan)
This biography of the Nobel Prize winner and schizophrenic mathematical genius John Forbes Nash surprisingly brings to mind the main character in Dostoyevsky's great novel, "Crime and Punishment." Like the intense, reclusive student, Raskolnikov, Nash in this biography comes across as an extremely anti-social and arrogant young man, convinced that his genius gives him certain rights and freedoms beyond the petty restrictions, rules, and manners that govern normal human conduct.
But whereas Dostoyevsky's character commits a murder, Nash's main offense is merely to be an arrogant and boorish lout, forever trying to show off to his fellow students at Princeton. When he is later struck down by mental illness after achieving so much so young, we can't help feeling there is an element of hubris involved.
Nash also fits into the popular paradigm of the lop-sided genius, the person of incredible talents who can't deal with the simpler aspects of daily life. As in the case of the notoriously absent-minded Albert Einstein -- whom Nash meets in the book -- or the equally eccentric Isaac Newton, we somehow feel reassured that these supreme geniuses have their weaknesses. For all these reasons, this is a story that resonates on a mythic and psychological level. We keep rooting for Nash, but also secretly look forward to him tripping up. This reflects the ambivalent attitude to the sciences that most people have -- we are both intrigued by new discoveries but afraid of their ramifications.
Around the age of 30, Nash's quest to find greater meaning in the Universe sparked off his insanity as he started to discern complex codes implanted by extra-terrestrials in the random occurrence of certain letters of the alphabet in daily life. But, although this is essentially a tragedy of a brilliant mind struck down by schizophrenia, it is nevertheless one with a happy ending. After paying his dues for his genius and arrogance, Nash gradually recovers and receives his apotheosis in the 1994 Nobel Prize for economics.
Movies and books are radically different media, so don't expect this to read like the recent Oscar-winning movie that it inspired. The expansiveness of the written word allows for much more detail to emerge as well as countless digressions and forays into the worlds of science and mathematics that the movie had no space for. So, if you saw the movie and loved it, this biography still has plenty to offer.
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