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 JOHN
NASH: part 2
AUTOBIOGRAPHIC DESCRIPTION
OF ILNESS
Read part 1:
John Nash's Story
John F. Nash introduced the distinction between cooperative
games, in which binding agreements can be made, and non-cooperative
games, where binding agreements are not feasible. Nash developed
an equilibrium concept for non-cooperative games that later
came to be called Nash equilibrium.
(from
Nobel Foundation Website)
(...) The mental disturbances originated in the early months
of 1959 at a time when Alicia happened to be pregnant. And
as a consequence I resigned my position as a faculty member
at M.I.T. and, ultimately, after spending 50 days under "observation"
at the McLean Hospital, travelled to Europe and attempted
to gain status there as a refugee.
I later spent times of the order of five to eight months in
hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis and
always attempting a legal argument for release.
And it did happen that when I had been long enough hospitalized
that 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 interludes of, as it were, enforced rationality,
I did succeed in doing some respectable mathematical research
(...). But after my return to the dream-like delusional hypotheses
in the later 60's I became a person of delusionally influenced
thinking but of relatively moderate behavior and thus tended
to avoid hospitalization and the direct attention of psychiatrists.
Thus further time passed. Then 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.
So at the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again
in the style that is characteristic of scientists. (...)
Read: John Nash's Story
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