- John Nash was a mathematician who taught at MIT from 1951-1959 and struggled with schizophrenia. - The film A Beautiful Mind, which depicts Nash's life and illness, was nominated for 8 Academy Awards including Best Picture. - While the film took artistic liberties, it brought renewed attention to Nash's real-life story of overcoming mental illness to win the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994.

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A BEAUTIFUL MIND - QUIZ
https://www.awesomestories.com/asset/view/A-Beautiful-Mind
Write your answers from the information you read about Dr. John Nash in A Beautiful Mind.
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1. What did John Nash write when he was 21?
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1. How many people suffer from schizophrenia in any given year?
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1. When does the onset of the illness occur?
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1. From what do schizophrenics often suffer?
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1. Who were some of the geniuses that John Nash was surrounded by at Princeton?
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1. With whom did John Nash fall in love?
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1. How old was John Nash when he became a paranoid schizophrenic?
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1. During his illness, what did John Nash hear?
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1. After Alicia divorced him, what did she allow her ex-husband to do?
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1. When and how old was John Nash when he received the Nobel Prize?
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DAY 1: What are some of the symptoms of schizophrenia?
Some of the symptoms of schizophrenia include hallucinations, delusions, disordered thinking and social
withdrawal
DAY 2: How does Professor R. J. Duffin recall John Nash?
Professor R. J. Duffin recalled John Nash as a tall, slightly awkward student who came to him one day
and described a problem he thought he had solved.
DAY 3: How does Dr. Nash describe what he went through?
Dr. Nash described what he went through by explaining: The mental disturbances originated in the early
months of 1959 at a time when Alicia was pregnant. As a consequence I resigned my position as a faculty
member at MIT, and spent 50 days in observation at McLean hospital.
DAY 4: What does Dr. Nash say about the movie which features his life?
"It's very fictional, and makes me relaxed in a way. It was very disturbing psychologically overall, but
when I could think of it with some apartness, it was different."
DAY 5: Write about healing from a mental or physical illness.

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Answer KEY for AwesomeStories Quiz, A Beautiful Mind.
1. What did John Nash write when he was 21?
When he was 21, Nash wrote a doctoral thesis that eventually made him a Nobel Laureate.
1. How many people suffer from schizophrenia in any given year?
More than 2 million Americans suffer from schizophrenia in any given year.
1. When does the onset of the illness occur?
Onset of the illness often begins in the late teens or early twenties.
1. From what do schizophrenics often suffer?
Schizophrenics often suffer from hallucinations, delusions, disordered thinking, and social withdrawal.
Most people with schizophrenia continue to suffer chronically or episodically throughout their lives.
1. Who were some of the geniuses that John Nash was surrounded by at Princeton?
Some of the geniuses at Princeton were John Louis von Neumann and Solomon Lefschetz.
1. With whom did John Nash fall in love?
John Nash fell in love with Alicia Larde.
1. How old was John Nash when he became a paranoid schizophrenic?
John Nash became a paranoid schizophrenic when he was 30 years old.
1. During his illness, what did John Nash hear?
He heard voices. Not real voices. He heard voices within his head.
1. After Alicia divorced him, what did she allow her ex-husband to do?
Alicia allowed her ex-husband to move back home.
1. When and how old was John Nash when he received the Nobel Prize?
In 1994, at the age of 66, he received the Nobel Prize.

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Deborah Halber, News Office - February 13, 2002
Mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr., an MIT faculty member from 1951-59, gained fame in 1994 when he won a
Nobel Prize in economics and again in 2001 when the movie " A Beautiful Mind " was released.
The movie, which is about Nash's 25-year struggle with schizophrenia, was nominated Tuesday for eight Academy
Awards , including best picture and best actor (Russell Crowe).
In real life, Nash was appointed a C.L.E. Moore instructor in 1951. While at MIT, he solved a classical unsolved
problem relating to differential geometry. He taught classes, and met and married MIT physics major Alicia Larde (S.B. 1955).
And it was during his tenure at MIT that he began to be consumed by the disease that he would later almost miraculously
overcome.
In the movie, Nash is said to win a prestigious appointment to MIT's Wheeler Laboratory after he receives a doctorate
from Princeton University. Wheeler Lab is portrayed as a large turn-of-the-century stone building encompassing classrooms
and offices.
But this was one of several points at which the movie took poetic license. "There is not and never has been any
Wheeler Lab at MIT," said Institute Professor Isadore M. Singer, who, like Nash, was a C.L.E. Moore instructor in the 1950s. "In
fact, I recognized nothing about MIT in the movie."
Because costs were a concern (the film had a lower budget than a typical Hollywood production), scenes depicting
MIT and Harvard were actually shot at Bronx Community College and at Manhattan College, with the rest on location at
Princeton University in New Jersey.
Prior to filming, director Ron Howard and members of his crew visited the MIT campus to scout locations and
interview faculty members who knew Nash, including Professors Hartley Rogers and Arthur P. Mattuck of mathematics.
Mattuck also was quoted extensively in Sylvia Nasar's biography of Nash with the same title.
The crew visited the Dep't of Mathematics in Bldg 2, spending time in the common room and several offices that are
similar to the one occupied by Nash. They also explored the campus and were enchanted by Killian Court.
In the movie, Bronx Community College's domed, columned Gould Memorial Library auditorium stands in for MIT's
Great Dome, and this building also was used for hospital and treatment room scenes. The Wheeler Lab building was actually
an abandoned wing of the Garden State Cancer Center, a research facility in Belleville, N.J.
According to Nash's autobiography for the Nobel committee, he joined MIT at age 23 because "it seemed desirable
more for personal and social reasons than academic ones to accept the higher-paying instructorship at MIT" and leave the one
he had held for a year after obtaining his doctorate at Princeton.
"Our office was on the third floor of Building 2 just left of the staircase you would take if you entered MIT from the
library side," Singer recalled. (The office in Room 2-363, has since been broken up into three offices.) "We taught two courses
one term and one course the other term. We also taught a course in the summer.
"A Beautiful Mind" scriptwriters took liberties with the facts in Nasar's biography. The book describes at length the
common room where Nash spent a lot of time with colleagues and students, but the movie doesn't touch on this.

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"The movie did not portray MIT at all," Singer said. "The book focused on Nash in the common room at MIT. I spent
little time there. The main activities in the math department were the seminars on the many developing topics in math. I
enjoyed and learned a lot in the seminars." Singer was interviewed and quoted in Nasar's biography.
Nasar writes that at MIT, Nash's "boyish looks and adolescent behavior won him nicknames like L'il Abner and the Kid
Professor." He also was dubbed "Gnash" for making belittling remarks about other mathematicians. He alienated students by
putting classic unsolved mathematics problems on tests, and was known for eccentricities such as mimicking his hero Nobert
Wiener's nearsighted habit of walking while holding onto walls.
"The movie and book focused on the heavy competition between young mathematicians. They completely ignored
the great cooperation among research mathematicians, which was my main experience at MIT," Singer said.
DECLINE AND RESURRECTION
It was while Nash was on sabbatical leave from MIT in 1956 that he married Larde, a 1955 physics graduate from El
Salvador who was in one of his classes. Soon afterwards, he began suffering from delusions that he was the Prince of Peace
and the Emperor of Antartica, Nasar related in "The Essential John Nash," published this year by Princeton University Press.
"The mental disturbances originated in the early months of 1959 at a time when Alicia happened to be pregnant,"
Nash wrote. In a paper he delivered at the World Congress of Psychiatry in 1999 describing his illness, he said, "I started to see
crypto-communists everywhere ... I started to think I was a man of great religious importance, and to hear voices all the time. I
began to hear something like telephone calls in my head, from people opposed to my ideas ... The delirium was like a dream
from which I never seemed to awake."
In May 1959, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and resigned from MIT.
"And it did happen that when I had been long enough hospitalized, I would finally renounce my delusional hypotheses
and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to mathematical research. In
these instances of, as it were, enforced rationality, I did succeed in doing some respectable mathematical research," Nash
wrote.
When the Nobel committee decided in 1994 to award Nash (jointly with John C. Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten) a
Nobel Prize in economics for his work on game theory, many of those who had built on this early work assumed he was dead.
Nasar credited longtime support from his wife (whom he divorced in 1963 and later remarried) and colleagues, as well as
Nash's determination to overcome his disease through sheer force of will, with his professional and personal resurrection.
"Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been
characteristic of my orientation," Nash wrote. "However, this is not entirely a matter of joy, as if someone returned from
physical disability to good physical health. One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's
concept of his relation to the cosmos."
Nash is now at Princeton, where he spent much of his time as he struggled with his disease. At one point he was
known as the Phantom because he mutely wandered the halls and scrawled mysterious messages on blackboards.
"My current research interests include logic, game theory, and cosmology and gravitation," Nash writes on his
Princeton web page. In 1994, he said that while it would be "improbable" that a mathematician of his age would be able to
add much to his previous achievements, he still hoped to "achieve something of value through my current studies or with any
new ideas that come in the future."