John Nash (1928-2015) Tribute List

Nobel Prize winner John Forbes Nash, Jr., 86, was killed in a car accident on May 23, 2015 along with his wife, Alicia, who was 82. Nash's story was told in " A Beautiful Mind," a book adapted into a major Hollywood film starring Russell Crowe as Nash. Nash made major breakthroughs in the sub-field of math and economics known as game theory while suffering from paranoid schizophrenia that led to several stays in institutions. Nash's research examined the outcome of cooperation and mutual benefit. He often spoke of having to ignore the voices in his head- a man so interested in cooperation had trouble getting the rest of his own mind to cooperate with him. Here are ten quotes from Nash about his life's work and his mental illness.
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words only definitions & notes
  1. delusion
    deception by creating illusory ideas
    Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.
  2. prodigy
    an unusually gifted or intelligent person
    Somebody suggested that I was a prodigy. Another time it was suggested that I should be called “bug brains,” because I had ideas, but they were sort of buggy or not perfectly sound… To some extent, sanity is a form of conformity. And to some extent, people who are insane are non-conformists…
  3. rationality
    the state of having good sense and sound judgment
    Rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person’s concept of his relation to the cosmos.
  4. delirium
    a usually brief state of excitement and mental confusion
    I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium and symptoms of schizophrenia.
  5. revelation
    the act of making something evident
    ...And so there's a transition from really having more of an enthusiasm for the numbers, like maybe magical or representing a divine revelation, and just a more scientific appreciation of numbers, and these not necessarily entirely far apart.
  6. eccentricity
    strange and unconventional behavior
    But I think the eccentricity may also connect with the irrational -- maybe people who are minimally eccentric are maybe least likely to go into insanity or something, it could be. Of course, for this, you need statistics.
  7. metaphysical
    pertaining to the philosophical study of being and knowing
    My quest has taken me through the physical, the metaphysical, the delusional -- and back.
    And I have made the most important discovery of my career, the most important discovery of my life: It is only in the mysterious equations of love that any logic or reasons can be found.
  8. moderate
    make less strong or intense; soften
    There are things that tend to moderate with age. Schizophrenia is somewhat like that.
  9. revert
    go back to a previous state
    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.
  10. analogous
    similar or equivalent in some respects
    So in rejecting some of the political ideas, that had a relation to the voices, so I could think of a voice maybe as presenting what was analogous to a political argument, and then I could say, I don't want to listen to that.
Created on Sun May 24 16:37:02 EDT 2015 (updated Mon May 25 21:33:27 EDT 2015)

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