What Makes Beautiful Minds

In Ron Howard's movie based on my biography, A Beautiful Mind, Russell Crowe plays Princeton mathematician and economics Nobel laureate John Forbes Nash Jr. From the first frame, the young Nash -- driven, brilliant, odd -- is obsessed with finding the truly original idea that will reveal reality's "governing dynamics" and, not coincidentally, win him mathematical stardom.

Clueless as Nash is about social dynamics, he correctly senses that it is ideas, as much as money, power, or sex, that make the world go round. That, of course, is what economic thinkers from Friedrich Hayek to Joseph Schumpeter, John Maynard Keynes, and Robert Solow have argued all along. The explosion of creative thinking in the past century and a half or so is the main reason living standards have risen eightfold, market economies have outperformed socialist ones, corporations have become innovation labs, and work has become more interesting.

And so we'd all love to understand, harness, and enhance that kind of thinking. How nations can promote creativity is the subject of many studies, including one by Edward C. Prescott, who just won a Nobel Prize in economics. But how the minds of truly original problem solvers such as John Nash work remains pretty much a mystery. While most of us can imagine writing a book and maybe painting a picture, very few of us can imagine composing Mahler's Ninth Symphony, or proving Fermat's Last Theorem. Such inventions strike us as magical, perhaps the reason one synonym for creativity is "wizardry."

The 21-year-old John Nash was certainly a bit of a wizard to have come up with the first theory of nearly everything. That's no exaggeration, either. Most theories apply to just one specific discipline. But game theory, the subject Nash is best known for tackling, applies to any situation involving a mix of competition and cooperation -- corporate rivalry, competition for votes, Darwinian struggles among species. Nash's thesis was just one of a spectacular string of problems that he solved before he turned 30 and the onset of delusions and hallucinations sapped his creative powers. In fact, most of the mathematicians I interviewed insisted that Nash's contribution to game theory was the most "trivial" of his accomplishments.

His theory of noncooperative games won him a Nobel Prize in 1994, more than 30 years after he fell ill with schizophrenia. When I began working on Nash's biography, I was very clear about spending most of the book telling the story of his twenties and his great burst of achievement, not his descent into madness. I found his ambition, focus, and obsession with originality extremely impressive. I was especially intrigued by the way he worked: what he chose to learn or ignore, how he picked problems, his strategies for solving them. At first, some of his work habits -- not reading, for example -- seemed merely eccentric. Now I realize that he was mostly trying hard to maintain his creative momentum and protect his unique way of seeing things. And as seemingly magical and unfathomable as his mathematical genius was, his methods for husbanding and marshaling it are likely to resonate with anyone who's striving to do something that hasn't been done before.

"His methods for husbanding and marshaling genius are likely to resonate with anyone who's striving to do something that hasn't been done before."

Nash absolutely believed in learning by doing. "Classes dull the mind," says Russell Crowe in one of the opening shots in the movie, reflecting Nash's sentiments completely. At 15, Nash was making pipe bombs, mixing beakers of nitroglycerin, and re-proving theorems by Fermat. Once he got to Princeton, "it was as if he wanted to reinvent, for himself, 300 years of mathematics," said the mathematician John Milnor, who was a freshman when Nash was a first-year grad student. Nash was also always primed for inspiration, no matter where or when it came. He quizzed well-known visiting lecturers, and carried a clipboard and jotted down ideas in illegible scribbles. Some of his best ideas came from trying to reconstruct arguments from his own indecipherable notes. Within a semester, he had invented something new -- a beautiful game played on a rhombus with Go stones -- that instantly established his reputation as a pure mathematician. Within 14 months, he had also started on the thesis that would win him the Nobel.