Excerpt of A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar
(Page 3 of 8)
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His contemporaries, on the whole, found him immensely strange. They described
him as "aloof," "haughty," "without affect,"
"detached," "spooky," "isolated," and
"queer." Nash mingled rather than mixed with his peers. Preoccupied
with his own private reality, he seemed not to share their mundane concerns. His
manner -- slightly cold, a bit superior, somewhat secretive -- suggested
something "mysterious and unnatural." His remoteness was punctuated by
flights of garrulousness about outer space and geopolitical trends, childish
pranks, and unpredictable eruptions of anger. But these outbursts were, more
often than not, as enigmatic as his silences. "He is not one of us"
was a constant refrain. A mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study
remembers meeting Nash for the first time at a crowded student party at
Princeton:
I noticed him very definitely among a lot of other people who were there. He
was sitting on the floor in a half-circle discussing something. He made me
feel uneasy. He gave me a peculiar feeling. I had a feeling of a certain
strangeness. He was different in some way. I was not aware of the extent of
his talent. I had no idea he would contribute as much as he really did.
But he did contribute, in a big way. The marvelous paradox was that the ideas
themselves were not obscure. In 1958, Fortune singled Nash out for his
achievements in game theory, algebraic geometry, and nonlinear theory, calling
him the most brilliant of the younger generation of new ambidextrous
mathematicians who worked in both pure and applied mathematics. Nash's insight
into the dynamics of human rivalry -- his theory of rational conflict and
cooperation -- was to become one of the most influential ideas of the twentieth
century, transforming the young science of economics the way that Mendel's ideas
of genetic transmission, Darwin's model of natural selection, and Newton's
celestial mechanics reshaped biology and physics in their day.
It was the great Hungarian-born polymath John von Neumann who first
recognized that social behavior could be analyzed as games. Von Neumann's 1928
article on parlor games was the first successful attempt to derive logical and
mathematical rules about rivalries. Just as Blake saw the universe in a grain of
sand, great scientists have often looked for clues to vast and complex problems
in the small, familiar phenomena of daily life. Isaac Newton reached insights
about the heavens by juggling wooden balls. Einstein contemplated a boat
paddling upriver. Von Neumann pondered the game of poker.
A seemingly trivial and playful pursuit like poker, von Neumann argued, might
hold the key to more serious human affairs for two reasons. Both poker and
economic competition require a certain type of reasoning, namely the rational
calculation of advantage and disadvantage based on some internally consistent
system of values ("more is better than less"). And in both, the
outcome for any individual actor depends not only on his own actions, but on the
independent actions of others.
More than a century earlier, the French economist Antoine-Augustin Cournot
had pointed out that problems of economic choice were greatly simplified when
either none or a large number of other agents were present. Alone on his
island, Robinson Crusoe doesn't have to worry about others whose actions might
affect him. Neither, though, do Adam Smith's butchers and bakers. They live in a
world with so many actors that their actions, in effect, cancel each other out.
But when there is more than one agent but not so many that their influence may
be safely ignored, strategic behavior raises a seemingly insoluble problem:
"I think that he thinks that I think that he thinks," and so forth.
Von Neumann was able to give a convincing solution to this problem of
circular reasoning for games that are two-person, zero-sum games, games in which
one player's gain is another's loss. But zero-sum games are the ones least
applicable to economics (as one writer put it, the zero-sum game is to game
theory "what the twelve-bar blues is to jazz; a polar case, and a point of
historical departure"). For situations with many actors and the possibility
of mutual gain -- the standard economic scenario -- von Neumann's superlative
instincts failed him. He was convinced that players would have to form
coalitions, make explicit agreements, and submit to some higher, centralized
authority to enforce those agreements. Quite possibly his conviction reflected
his generation's distrust, in the wake of the Depression and in the midst of a
world war, of unfettered individualism. Though von Neumann hardly shared the
liberal views of Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and the British economist John
Maynard Keynes, he shared something of their belief that actions that might be
reasonable from the point of view of the individual could produce social chaos.
Like them he embraced the then-popular solution to political conflict in the age
of nuclear weapons: world government.
Copyright © 1998 by Sylvia Nasar.
