Nobel Prize winner in economics, professor of mathematics John Nash is one of the most famous lunatics today. After his crazy and bizarre experience was adapted into the movie "Beautiful Mind" , Widely chanted all over the world. John Nash has been admitted to two psychiatric hospitals, at McLean Hospital near Boston in 1959 and Trenton Psychiatric Hospital near Princeton in 1961. Between the two admissions, he whimsically resigned from MIT, withdrew all his pension, and announced that he was going to travel to Europe. In July 1959, Nash's flight landed in Paris. He saw the entire city full of demonstrations, strikes, and explosions protesting the nuclear arms race. Until he was finally sent back to the United States, for nine months, Nash wandered in major cities in Europe, everywhere like Paris was full of noise and commotion under the Cold War consciousness, NATO and the Warsaw Pact were equally indistinguishable. Wandering around the European continent. These nine months of metaphorical wandering can't help but remind people of the wandering heroes in the fictional world: the female beggar by the Ganges that Duras never forgets, Mr. Bloom, who travels Dublin in a day in Joyce's writings, Of course there is also Homer singing about Odysseus who spent ten years returning home. These fictitious heroes, like Nash, use endless physical wanderings in an attempt to achieve a certain spiritual goal. The crazy world that Nash witnessed in Europe made me wonder: How can a schizophrenic patient who has just left a mental hospital face a macroscopic world that is crazier than that of a mental hospital, especially the macroscopic world that arguably claims that he is "Normal" and "rational". This question can also be asked in reverse: Does unprepared modernity and post-modernity make humans more rational and cold, or more intense fanaticism? Do modern people still have the right to isolate some of the same kind, and pronounced: "You are crazy, don't come close to us", even if the boundary between madness and non-madness has become a manifestation of power? The life of John Nash may be the answer to this question.
I have to write about the John Nash I know, but it is difficult for me to write. A beginning is a definition and a tone, and John Nash is difficult to define. During my four years in Princeton, I had many chances to meet him, "knowing" but not "understanding". Every time I knew him, I always overturned the previous opinion. Up to now, these complicated facts and feelings are layered on top of each other. I can only point to him and sigh: "Look, this man..." All the compliments, pity, sarcasm, look. Take
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look, look at this person. But he is getting old. He was eighty years old when I enrolled in school, and he didn't often walk around the campus. I saw John Nash for the first time at the end of my freshman year, and before that I saw his son often. In my freshman year, I found a part-time job in the engineering library. I sat in the library for two or three hours in the morning and midnight, scanning the bar codes of borrowers. The library at this time is always very deserted. The classmates have either not yet got up or have rested, but there are a few madmen and fools who live nearby. They can't move. The library comes as soon as the door is opened, and you will do some crazy things until midnight. Ask him three times before leaving. I remember one of the fat guys who always wore loose sweaters and a big beard. He sat in front of the computer for seven or eight hours. He probably had some kind of very serious epilepsy. He would suddenly moan and groan every few tens of minutes. , With his nose quivering, his feet wiggling, so loud for about half a minute, he was all better again as if he was okay. There was an uncontrollable beast in his body, and after a while he had to yell at his existence. I began to feel terrible. It was only when the senior who worked in the library told me that the crazy fat man was the official editor of Wikipedia and reviewed countless entries in front of the computer every day. Over time, I turned a blind eye to the madness of the lunatics who frequented the library, and gradually became less afraid and more close. In the middle of the night, I heard the dreamy moan of epileptic patients, trance like a lullaby in the mouth of a mother.
One of these library lunatics was forty or fifty years old, with long, dirty hair and a beard. He always wears a Princeton pullover. He lays down on a chair with his legs wide open. He has a thick book in his hand, which is often not opened. He puts it on his hand. When he is awake, his eyes are straight. Looking ahead, when he fell asleep, he looked up and died. I often see other lunatics with their normal expressions when they are awake. Only this lunatic, although he is very quiet, is always in a state of extreme confusion and annoyance. He often sits in a daze for a long time, then suddenly shakes his neck and arms violently, his eyebrows and nose are tightly twisted together, and he gasps in his mouth as if he is experiencing great pain. One day, when he was having such an episode, the senior pointed at him and said, "Here, this is the son of John Nash." "What!" I was surprised, "Isn't his son a Harvard graduate?" "That's "Beautiful Mind" "Compiled. Mental illness is a genetic disease." The senior said with a sneer.
That cruel encounter was the first time I was able to distinguish "Beautiful Mind" from the real John Nash. Later, I heard about the crazy deeds of John Nash’s son from a classmate in the mathematics department. It is said that his son often stays in the common room of the math building and writes bizarre and crazy formulas on the blackboard. One of the widely circulated formulas is this:
1 = Mercury
1+1 = Venus
1+1+1 = Jupiter
And so on, until he finished writing all the stars he knew, even "Perseus" and "Ursa".
Soon after learning the true situation of his son, I finally met John Nash himself. Occasionally walking on the road one day at the end of the freshman year, two elderly people walked towards each other. The man was tall and dry, and the woman was short and bloated. They were dressed in formal attire, and they were about to participate in the ceremony. I recognized that the man was Nash, and I was very excited to push a friend who was traveling with me. He said, "I saw it early." I asked who was the woman next to him, "Who else? Of course his wife." I was taken aback again. This image is as beautiful as Jennifer Connelly. The wives are so different. When my friend saw me startled, it was partly comforting and partly mocking, "When I was young, I was probably pretty, but now I am old. Speaking of which, "Beautiful Mind" talked about how they are like a fairy and a couple, in fact, not long after he went crazy. She was about to ask for a divorce. They lived in the same house for so many years, and they only had a relationship with people. It was not until the film was made in 2001 that they remarried." The two old men walked past us, staggering, without saying a word. , They are so alienated, both like the alienation of strangers, but also like the alienation of acquaintances for too many years. The bubble about the miracle of love created by "Beautiful Mind" in my heart was burst. I just saw the humble night state of an ordinary old man.
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Fortunately, most of the ordinary people or be a movie inspired bubble, mention Nash always think of "A Beautiful Mind"; many scholars like foam inspired by game theory, trying to jump on the bandwagon in their research on game theory point of Riga. Game theory has been hot in the frontiers of various disciplines in recent years. I heard Nash's name in many classes in Princeton. The more fields that seem to be far from game theory, such as biology, comparative literature, and history, the more scholars there are. I tried my best to get some relatives with game theory. In those lectures, Nash's name is always equated with "Nash Equilibrium". Only once, I heard the professor talk about Nash in a completely different context. That was a lecture on abnormal psychology. "Today I want to talk to you about an interesting case of schizophrenia. The protagonist of the case is the famous Professor Nash." The professor of psychology took out a huge old-fashioned video tape player and placed it on the projector. I gave us an interview. I still remember the first sentence of the narration in the interview: "John Nash had severe schizophrenia, but he insisted that his illness was cured by willpower."
John Nash once suffered from severe schizophrenia, but he insisted that his illness was cured by willpower. He hated mental hospitals and drugs. So far he talked about his wife forcibly sending him to a mental hospital. He has palpitations on his face. He had two hospitalization experiences. The first time he was admitted to the Macleans Hospital, which treats the upper class, the doctors treated schizophrenia as a mental illness, doing psychological counseling all day long and asking about his childhood experiences. His colleague Donald Newman (Donald Newman) went to see him, and Nash said: "Donald, if I don't become normal, they won't let me out. But, I've never been normal..." The second time Admitted to the Trenton Mental Hospital. The interviewer revisited his old place. Nash stood on the lawn, gazing at the towering dim building, and refused to get closer. "They give you injections to make you look like an animal, so that they can treat you like an animal." Here, he was forced to accept the insulin coma treatment that has now been discontinued by the Western medical community: high-dose insulin injections, Let the mental patient fall into a coma. When the patient is awake, it looks like a walking dead. He started to eat only vegetarian food to protest the treatment in the hospital. Of course, no one took this seriously. After a long period of insulin coma treatment, he finally "becomes normal". He has never been so humble and polite in his life. My colleague’s wife recalled: “He looked as good as he had just been beaten.”
Half a year later, the humble and polite John Nash was finally discharged from the London Mental Hospital. He changed into his dirty patient clothes and handed over his number (he didn't have a name for half a year, only this number was identified), he staggered out of the hospital, the first thing he did was to find his childhood friend, "tell me Tell me about the things we played together. The treatment wiped out my childhood memories."
If returning to rationality only means tame of social standards and loss of memory, how much value is there in healing? Especially for a genius like Nash who regarded mathematics as "the only important thing." The purest mathematics in Professor Nash's mind is not reason, but inspiration. Reason is just a means of communicating this kind of inspiration, and if regaining reason also means losing inspiration, he is willing to give up reason. A friend visited him when he was in the hospital: "You claimed that aliens were talking to you when you were mad. But how can a rational mathematician like you believe in nonsense about aliens?" Nash replied, " The creative ideas of mathematics entered my mind like aliens. I believe that aliens exist, just as I believe in mathematics." He wrote in his notebook: "Rational thinking blocks the closeness of man and the universe. (Rational) thoughts impose a limit on a person's relation to the cosmos.) "
Shortly after being discharged from the London Psychiatric Hospital, Nash refused to accept any medication because the treatment made him feel slow and could not think about mathematics. His former colleague assigned him a spare position as a researcher at Princeton University. As a result, students often see a middle-aged man wearing red running shoes described as wandering around the campus haggardly, writing illogical formulas on the entire blackboard, and appearing to a professor with hundreds of mathematical formulas just calculated the night before. In his office, he has a nickname, "The Ghost of Mathematics Building." Few people know who this lunatic is.
In the 1970s and 1980s, relatives and friends around him began to notice that Nash was not going crazy. His eyes became clear, and his behavior became logical. "So, without treatment, how did you recover?" the interviewer asked him. "As long as I want. One day, I start to want to become rational." From that day on, he began to debate with the voices he had heard, refuting those voices, "Use rationality to distinguish irrationality, and common sense to distinguish illusions. (I) reasoned myself out of the unreasonable; I became disillusioned of my illusions.)"
"As long as I want." In Nash's case, madness and reason seem to have become a free will choice. I don't even believe that he was really mad; perhaps, he chose madness rationally, and returned to reason madly. From this point of view, "Beautiful Mind" is a serious mistranslation of A Beautiful Mind, and should be written as "Beautiful Mind" or "Beautiful Wisdom" to be more realistic. Mind certainly has a dual interpretation of mind and soul, but in the process of Nash's regaining reason from madness, what we see is that extraordinary will and reason suppress the crazy mind. Or, to put it more accurately: From a certain day in the 1970s and 1980s, he consciously chose to use part of the craziness for mathematical inspiration, and imprison the remaining craziness with reason.
The videotape of the interview was over. The professor of abnormal psychology said: "The case of Nash recovering without medication has aroused the interest of many psychiatrists. They studied his daily life and surrounding environment, hoping that his case would have promotion value. However, in my opinion, the real cure for Nash may not be his extraordinary intelligence and willpower, but honor. In the 1970s and 1980s, game theory developed rapidly in economics, and Nash's reputation grew. In 1994, he won. After the Nobel Prize in Economics, he became a lot more cheerful overnight, and he was almost a different person. After receiving the award, he was walking in the street, and strangers often paid tribute to him, "
Professor Nash, congratulations."" This is the professor of psychology . Fan comments are not nonsense. When Nash went mad, he was struggling to pursue the highest Fields Medal in mathematics and couldn't. If he can get the Fields Medal in time, maybe he won't go crazy under the loss and pressure. To go further: Honor lowers the scale of social standards, and everything becomes beautiful and justice under the aura of honor. Frenzy behavior is dismissed as "crazy" in normal people, and praised as "maverick" in Nobel Prize winners. So, is it possible that Professor Nash's madness has not been cured, but the general public has cured their standards of madness?
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Then tell me a story I experienced between Nash and the general public, and tell me what role academic reputation plays in this slow university town. In the spring of my sophomore year, I was elected president of the Princeton Math Club by mistake, and since then I have become friends with a bunch of super strange mathematical geniuses. In addition to regularly inviting professors to speak and playing table games that require too much intelligence on weekends, this club also organizes three major events a year: sending teams to participate in the International College Student Mathematical Olympiad in the summer, organizing the Princeton Mathematical Competition for high school students in the fall, and spring Organize a formal dinner with mathematics professors and undergraduate students. A few days after my new official took office, I was going to have a formal dinner. I was afraid that there would be few people coming and the scene would be unsightly, so I asked the former chairman for advice. He said: “It’s easy to ask a professor. You email all math professors and you are done. As for asking students, you just write on the poster, “Want to see John Nash’s real body? Come to join the math club. Let’s have a dinner!’ Make sure that countless people will come over to watch the excitement.” I did, and soon many students signed up, and many professors said they would participate, but I never received a reply from John Nash.
The dinner day was the second weekend of May. We booked the hall on the highest floor of the Mathematics Building and put a dozen round tables on it. One of the students who attended the banquet had not yet arrived. We were placing utensils and food. When the elevator door opened, three people came out. It was John Nash and his wife and children. I went to greet him in a panic, "Professor Nash, everyone will be very happy when you come. The dinner has not officially started. You might as well sit at this table first."
"Are you Miss Shen who sent the email?" he asked.
"Yes, it was my email. My name is Lily." I replied.
"Miss Shen, hello." He didn't seem to hear my answer, "Will John Conway come? I heard he will come."
"Professor Conway did reply that he would come, and he also said that he would come for a dinner. Speech."
The dinner started soon. Professor Conway did not arrive. I called his house and his wife said, "I'm so sorry, he completely forgot about it." So Professor Conway won't come, let alone expect He made a speech. Most of the professors who replied that they would come were also absent. "Miss Shen, will John Conway come? The dinner has already started for half an hour." Professor Nash asked me again. I said, no, he forgot about it. "Really." Nash was a little lost, so I was also a little lost, but the classmates didn't care much, everyone was overjoyed, "Isn't there Nash there!" Everyone looked at the table where Nash was sitting. Many people deliberately walked a long way when they went to get food, passing by Nash, and greeted shyly: "Hello Professor Nash." The senior students introduced to the first-year freshmen, "That's Nash, that's his wife." , That's his son." Showing off his knowledge and knowledge. But no one dared to sit down at the table where the Nash family sat. In contrast, other professors were surrounded by students and colleagues, and everyone laughed. I mobilized friends I know, "You would rather have so many people crowded at this table, wouldn’t it be better to go to Nash’s table? Think about it, you can tell people in the future, I had dinner with Nash..." My friends were a little eager to try , But they all jokingly carried each other up, you pushed me and I pushed you, no one changed seats. After procrastinating a few times, the dinner is almost over. Nash's table is still sitting only with him and his family, and the remaining seven seats are lonely and empty. His son was lying on the table, beating his head mechanically, his wife was sitting on the floor with her hands crossed without a word, while Nash was eating a piece of meat very slowly in silence. I looked at this lonely and desolate scene, but I couldn't do anything to blame myself.
At this moment, a freshman girl walked up to Nash and stammered: "Professor Nash, can I take a photo with you? I really—I think—you are great!" Nash was stunned. ,Nod. She stood behind John Nash, took a sweet photo, then took the camera and ran to her friend, laughing and yelling again, as if she had just done something amazing. Inspired, everyone stood up, walked towards John Nash, consciously lined up, some holding cameras in their hands, "Professor, can I take a photo with you?" Some have nothing, that's true. Children who are passionate about mathematics want to hear Nash talk about game theory and Nash's embedding theorem. Suddenly, the senior mathematics graduate who was at the same table with me also stood up. He was always cynical and arrogant. At this moment, he also had a camera in his hand. He mocked himself to defend himself. "Fucking me in the mathematics department for four years, I was abused by the disgusting proof problem every day. In the end, I didn't even take a picture of Zhang fucking Nash.
I told you not to fucking laugh people?" I want to tell you that late spring. In the evening, all boys wore shirts and trousers, and all girls wore floral skirts. I want to tell you that the math building is the tallest building in the school, and the hall on the highest floor of the math building is full of uninterrupted viewing glass 360 degrees. The picturesque campus can be seen through the glass: visitors canoeing on the shore of Lake Carnegie are rowing back leisurely, a few big fat geese under the tower of the graduate school are chatting stupidly, and there are many people taking pictures in front of the church and art gallery. , And the children sunbathing under Blair’s Arch may already feel cold, put away their blankets and prepare to go home, and those thousands of gray and black squirrels scattered all over the corners of the campus, they may be busy preparing for the cold winter. For a feast, we might be able to steal a donut from this canteen, and a chocolate from that bedroom...We lined up to take pictures with Nash, and by the way, we looked at the grass and trees of the campus through the viewing glass, and The setting sun also looked at us, everyone's faces and bodies were covered with a rosy halo. I want to tell you that the touching ceremony of writing in "Beautiful Mind" was completely fabricated by the director, but that evening, the young people who lined up on the top floor of the math building waiting to take a photo or talk with Professor Nash, their Stuttering and pushing three and four, isn't it more emotional than the fictitious pen-giving ceremony? "Professor Nash, I really—I think—you are great!"
Professor Nash has recovered from madness; in other words, since the Nobel Prize and "Beautiful Mind", no one thinks that his abnormality is something that must be corrected. And he was lonely, and the students did not dare to talk to him, let alone eat with him at the table. However, the long line for Nash in the late spring and many warm anecdotes similar to this are probably enough to support him to stay calm and peaceful and spend his night.
Fourth,
finally, I would like to talk about the origin of Professor Nash's madness. Nash was born a weird and arrogant person, and it is not surprising that there are so many mathematics geniuses. So, how can a person with weird nature be suddenly considered "crazy" by relatives and friends? One day at the age of 30, he suddenly claimed that communists and anti-communists belong together, and they are all "conspirators"; he said that Eisenhower and the Pope of the Vatican did not have any sympathy for him; the turmoil in the Middle East made him deeply disturbed , He called anonymously to relatives and friends, saying that the end of the world had arrived. "These thoughts on the surface are not rational, but there could be a situation." During nine months of wandering in Europe in 1959, he went several times. The local government asked for help, hoping to renounce American citizenship; he arrived in Geneva, because the city is known for being friendly to refugees. He told the Swiss that “the American system is fundamentally wrong”, and no one believed him. He was sent back to the country by plane. Afterwards, he claimed: He was sent to a ship and was chained like a slave.
The Iron Curtain of the Cold War has finally come down, and Nash's madness recognized by his relatives and friends now seems to be almost a prophet's prophecy. Nash's fear is not only an individual experience, but the collective subconscious fear of that era. And Nash was accused of being mad and forced to enter a coma with insulin. Isn't it the totalitarianism of that era's persecution of personal conscience? I watched Nash's ship, which was chained like a slave. When the ship of fools wandered freely on the ocean, Michel Foucault was giving it profound philosophical significance in his graduation thesis "Madness and Civilization". If lunatics are not just lunatics, but wise men who have exposed the fundamental ills of this society, they can only be sent on the boat of fools and drifted into the unknown distance. The ancient river gave the ship of fools a mystery, and the lunatic was sacred and isolated as a sacrifice to the social system. I think I have gone too far, although I have to say that since 1962, Professor John Nash has settled near Princeton and goes to school every day. If Princeton University has any credit for Professor Nash's recovery, it is its inherent tolerance and freedom to refuse to send lunatics into the boat of fools. The lunatics wander around the campus like ghosts, and people are still respectful and considerate. They are free to enter and exit the public library, shouting horrible noises when they become ill, but someone tells you: "Don't disturb him, this madman is the editor of Wikipedia..."
Last Tuesday, Professor John Nash selected my choice Guest speech in game theory class. "I want to talk about the history of Nash equilibrium." For forty minutes, he has been talking about several essays he wrote. It is too esoteric, I am afraid that none of the students can understand it. But this does not prevent the entire classroom from being full of audiences, not only the students who took this course, but also the observers who heard the news.
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