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1. I want to know more about Yan Kah Ke

5 comments about A Beautiful Mind ('Meili jing jie', in traditional Chinese, NOT in English).

1. Sylvia Nasar writes a wonderful biography of the life of John Nash. We see Nash as an unhappy child who finds success in mathematics and becomes both arrogant and self-centered. He sets high goals but falls short failing to win the Fields medal. Yet he makes phenomenal mathematical discoveries and his work in game theory had a major impact in the field of economics. Alicia is a wonderful wife who keeps things together when John starts having his bouts with depression and insanity. At times he is unable to function and then at other times he recovers and shows signs of his former brilliance.
   
   We feel that we understand him. The Nobel Prize in economics would rightfully have been his long ago because of tremendous impact of his equilibrium theory. However, it seems that the Nobel committee is reluctant to award the prize to someone who needs to spend much of his time in a mental institution.
   
   Miraculously Nash recovers in the 1990s and is awarded the prize in 1995. The story is heartwarming and reads like great fiction but it is actually true!
   
   This was made into a well done movie that I also enjoyed very much.



2. In Sylia Nasar's award-winning biography, A Beautiful Mind, which chronicles the life of mathematics genius and Nobel laureate John Nash, she divides his life into three acts (though the table of contents does not): genius, madness and reawakening. Act one, his genius phase, covers the first two parts of the book, and lasts for the first 29 years of his life. Act two - madness, which takes the form of schizophrenia - covers the next two parts, and lasts until he is 62. Act three, his awakening, covers his remission from schizophrenia, his receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for Economics in 1994, and his life at Princeton up to the present. The book was made into an Oscar-winning motion picture by director Ron Howard in 2001 and stars Russell Crowe. Both book and film are phenomenal, as are the man's life and Crowe's portrayal of it.
   
   Particularly interesting about act one of Nash's life, and part one of Nasar's book, is the discussion on game theory. Game theory, up until the time of Nash, was based upon the idea that only one player in a game can win and everyone else must lose. But Nash broke with tradition in his doctoral thesis by theorizing mathematically the results of a game in which everyone won, regardless of the number of players. His thesis became the basis of modern economic theory, and the reason for his eventual Nobel prize.
   
   Nasar does an exceptional job explaining game theory and the workings of the mind of a genius, and especially Nash's original idea, which he called "the Nash equilibrium," and introduced in 1950 when he was only 21. Nash theorized that a game could be both competitive and cooperative - as opposed to the "winner take all" stakes of purely competitive games like chess - and could result in a desirable balance of power, rather than the undesirable condition of domination by a single power. In other words, when a player considers both his own good and the collective good of the other players, the results are better for everyone. This allowed gaming theory to be applicable to economics, politics and other sciences.
   
   In Ron Howard's film, he illustrates this beautifully with the scene in the bar in which all the boys want the beautiful blonde who walks in. Russell Crowe's character, Nash, explains to his friends that if they all go for the blonde, they will all lose, because they will offend the blonde's friends, causing them all to strike out. But if each of them goes for a different girl, they will all score. This is the moment Nash realizes he has found the original idea for his doctoral thesis.
   
   Socially, Nash had no friends growing up. This is ironic for a person whose greatest contribution to science was a theory of relationships. It is also interesting in that it illustrates something about the environment needed to develop into both a genius and a schizophrenic: isolation. As Nasar puts it, "His overriding interest was in patterns, not people." I don't think a lack of interest in people is required for genius, but I do believe an interest in patterns is. It was his ability to see patterns in numbers that led Nash into numerology and decoding imagined ciphers for the Pentagon.
   
   Howard does an excellent job showing Nash's ability to recognize pattern in the opening scene when Russell Crowe insults a fellow student's tie after recognizing several patterns in it that are reflected in the layout of the punch table. He does it again when he is able to pick out the pattern of an umbrella in the stars for his love interest and future wife, Alicia, played by Jennifer Connelly. And when he is decoding for agent Parcher, played by Ed Harris, the patterns that he sees in the numbers and words "light up."
   
   Until he meets Alicia, who would stand by him through his illness and help him overcome it, Nash's relationships are cloaked in mystery and innuendoes. It is not important to get into them here; but let me just say that the homosexual community was vocally disappointed by Howard's choice to leave them out of his film. I believe he was right to do so, if for no other reason than that they would have added nothing to the story; but more because no one is certain of what those relationships consisted. Nash himself did not consider himself a homosexual, so it may be that they were merely codependent. Regardless, they would undoubtedly have been immature and ego-centric, as all his personal relationship were before he met Alicia.
   
   Alicia brought something to Nash's life that he had never experienced before: another focus besides himself and mathematics. Before her, his world revolved around the fact that he considered himself a mathematical genius. Now there was someone else to consider. Alicia drove a wedge into an otherwise self-focused, isolated life. She was the person that would recognize his slipping into schizophrenia - although she didn't know what it was at the time - and she was the one that would bring him back. Connelly is wonderful in the role of Alicia. Howard uses their relationship in the film to turn an otherwise straight thriller into a love story. It is this combination that makes A Beautiful Mind very much like a Hitchcock film; and yet, because it is true, it is even more interesting.
   
   Ron Howard is masterful at blurring the line between what is real and what is not in Nash's world. We are never really sure until the day of the storm, when Alicia goes out to get the laundry off the line and discovers what is in the garage. That is an exciting scene, especially when combined with the scene of the baby's bath, and then with the scene following in which Parcher (Harris) holds a gun on Alicia and tells Nash that she is threatening the mission. The conclusion that Nash voices, as he tries to prevent Alicia from leaving, breaks the tension: "She never grows old" (talking about Charles' niece Marcee). That is when he shows he realizes that something is wrong in his world.
   
   How he deals with his problem is what makes his "a beautiful mind." Once he is diagnosed with schizophrenia, he is given the usual drug and shock treatments. But he realizes that the treatments being administered to save his mind are also destroying it. With Alicia's consent and help, he tries to overcome his problem using the power of his own mind. It is because of her love and support, and the support of the mathematics community, that he succeeds.
   
   There is a key scene in the movie - the scene when he receives the recognition of his colleagues in the faculty dining room in the "pen ceremony" - when Thomas King tells him about his being considered for the Nobel Prize. Nash explains to King how he overcame his schizophrenia. He says it is like having an appetite for something but, rather than feeding it, choosing to starve it. He said he had an appetite for certain things in his life that weren't real. They are still there - talking about Charles, Marcee and Parcher - but he doesn't acknowledge them. Thus, they no longer have the power to affect his life.
   
   To me, this is the take-away from both Nasar's book and Howard's film. We all have appetites for things that are not healthy, not real - fantasies in which we play "what if" scenarios in our heads. Like Nash, we can choose to ignore them and go on to lead happy, healthy, productive lives. Or, as he did during his mad period, we can indulge and become involved with them, allowing them to affect and ultimately destroying us. Like Nash, we have power over our own thoughts, and, thereby, over our own lives. If we choose well, we, too, will have beautiful minds and beautiful lives. It's up to us.
   
   Waitsel Smith



3. John Forbes Nash Jr. is one of the most intriguing personalities I've known or read about. A precocious math genius and one of the few persons responsible for the establishment of game theory, he succumbed to mentally-decapacitating schizophrenia at around the age of 30. I think Sylvia Nasar succeeds wonderfully in recounting the personal aspect of Nash's life such as his various eccentricities and the effects his mental illness had on both himself and those around him, but when it comes to the science and theories the book is a wee bit disappointing. Of course this book is a biography and is therefore more concerned about his life than his work, but a lot of interesting examles could have been been used to more clearly illustrate Nash's theories that I was quite surprised Nasar didn't give at least a few of them. Until his theories are better understood, the enormity of Nash's genius could not be fully appreciated.
   
   Recommended for its storytelling, but if you'd like to grab the gist of the technical stuff read his published papers or game theory textbooks.



4. I assisted Nash with the C programming language at Princeton and was a source for the book.
   
   I found the book accurate, well-written, and readable. The part of the book that talks about the period in which Nash's economics prize was considered was indeed one in which this very private man was under a microscope, and my supervisor warned me to be very sensitive to his condition.
   
   Sylvia Nasar knows her craft very well. The book is narratively organized, and she doesn't need to do dramatic flashbacks or grabbers to get you to keep turning the pages. It's a man's life, in America of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s...to the early nineties, by which time Nash had become the Phantom of Fine Hall.
   
   But, Phantoms have a story too. Anyone interested in the human side of math and science, anyone interested in psychology, anyone who is impressed by women who both "stand by their man" and get a career of their own, will enjoy reading the story.
   
   The book is much more detailed and far more accurate than the movie, which had to take liberties with the truth to be entertaining. It includes Nash's other common-law wife Eleanor and a son by that marriage, which was very different from Nash's relationship with Alicia.
   
   The book is long but will probably be very rewarding for most readers.



5. I read this book about two weeks ago, and I couldn't put it down. Maybe my opinion is biased because I have schizophrenia myself, but I found this story to be particularly encouraging in terms of my own recovery. The genius John Nash refused the coercive treatments of psychiatry and recovered naturally as some people do. I think it's sad that John could never reach the height of his mathematical genius again, after his illness, but it's still a hopeful story because he made a complete recovery, in my opinion. This book explains the mysterious and challenging symptoms of a misunderstood illness, and it also tells a tale of a person with the classic schizophrenic personality. It seems Nash was predisposed to the illness, and his behavior leading up to his first episode is characteristic of they typical schizophrenic. The difference between Nash's story and those of so many others with this difficult illness is that John was a true genius, became mad, and then recovered through sheer willpower. I think this book challenges the prevailing biopsychiatric model of schizophrenia and demonstrates that people can indeed recover without the use of toxic psychiatric drugs. You can also learn a lot about the politics of the Nobel Prize in this book.

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3 comments about A Higher Kind of Loyalty.

1. Absolutely absorbing! Liu Binyan is showing why he is seen as China's most influential investigative reporter. The book reads like a novel. It takes the reader inside the soul of the ordinary Chinese people. Page after page is filled with images of tremendous dignity and courage in the face of a strangulating system. Characters come alive like the young woman, Zhang Zhixin, who realized that Mao's policies had failed and said so. For this she was condemmed to death by firing squad. But in order to prevent her from having the last word the State cut her larynx. Curt Vonnegut's answer to what it is in the German character that allowed such atrocities to happen in WW2 echoes repeatedly "obedience". Obeying laws that are not in the common good. The spirit of the Chinese people rises high above and will not be quieted by violence. "We will all repent in this generation not only for the hateful words and deeds of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people." Martin Luther King



2. Absolutely absorbing! Liu Binyan is showing why he is seen as China's most influential investigative reporter. The book reads like a novel. It takes the reader inside the soul of the ordinary Chinese people. Page after page is filled with images of tremendous dignity and courage in the face of a strangulating system. Characters come alive like the young woman, Zhang Zhixin, who realized that Mao's policies had failed and said so. For this she was condemmed to death by firing squad. But in order to prevent her from having the last word the State cut her larynx. Curt Vonnegut's answer to what it is in the German character that allowed such atrocities to happen in WW2 echoes repeatedly "obedience". Obeying laws that are not in the common good. The spirit of the Chinese people rises high above and will not be quieted by violence. "We will all repent in this generation not only for the hateful words and deeds of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people." Martin Luther King



3. At first glance, you could mistake this work as just another in the growing "I survived the Cultural Revolution" genre of books. However, while this does address Liu's treatment during the Cultural Revolution, it goes far beyond typical books of the genre.
   
   In the words of the late-Arthur Miller, "But it is not quite the now-familiar tale of tortures and endless persecution, for there is a powerful stylistic directness, a wealth of detailed observation, and the passionate humanity of a witness and victim of the most surrealistic tyranny of this or any other age." This sentence is the most apt description, and it isn't surprising that it came from someone once persecuted due to perceived political views half-a-century ago.
   
   This is a powerful read. Liu Binyan joined the Communist Party during the anti-Japanese War in the 1940s. His goal was idealistic, borne out of an undying love and patriotism for his country. Sadly, the leaders of the Communist Party didn't have the same idealistic visions held by Liu. Liu was constantly persecuted for trying to help the Party and thus the country. Liu displays a passion for the common people of China that the Party cadres could have learned well from, but by in large would refuse to do.
   
   This is very readable and compelling. As a journalist himself, Liu has presented a compelling tale of the true situation during his life in China. The fact that this is a translation from the original Chinese does little to detract from the attractiveness of the narrative.
   
   Of interest to this China watcher was the use of time-worn phrases that the Chinese Communists use in the media, all of which within China is under their control. While the phrases have changed to some extent, the media in China still uses such phrases to this day.
   
   While this work is a bit dated in that it was published in 1990, many of the methods used by the media and the control of that media by the Chinese Communists hasn't changed significantly since the time this book was published.
   
   This book is a must read if you are interested in contemporary China, or if you are interested in the general topic of the human struggle for improvement and, most of all, liberty.

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