John Forbes Nash was one of the most eccentric and troubled people ever to make significant contributions. Despite a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, characterized by hallucinations and terror, he, with the help of his wife, Alicia, managed to come to grips with his issues and live by all accounts an odd, but in many ways successful, life.
Nash was a mathematician — a codebreaker of the highest order, by his own estimation initially, and then by others. Burdened with a big ego and a sarcastic wit, he frequently found himself excluded from jovial and productive environments. He charted his own course — one which could have led to an early death or even suicide.
Per the interesting movie about his life, “A Beautiful Mind”, (which ignores significant aspects of his life and paints a more attractive picture of his circumstances than was probably was the reality)and the book it was based on by Sylvia Nasar, Nash seems obsessed with a compulsion to find an ‘original idea’ that would give him the prestige he sought, and allow him to make a significant contribution to mathematics. He did that on more than one occasion, earning the Nobel Prize in 1994. In fact, when he and his wife were killed in an automobile crash on the New Jersey Turnpike (in a cab, it was not their fault) a year ago they were returning from one of many more award ceremonies, where his contributions were gratefully acknowledged by his peers.
Yet there may be at least one more contribution that John Nash made to the human family. It comes, not in the field of mathematics, per se, but in his character as a human being. In his own way, with help from his wife, doctors, and at times medication and even shock therapy, he managed to confront the particular characteristics of his own illness and deal with them in a constructive manner. Although voices apparently remained in his head, he decided to stop listening to them. He managed to starve their power to terrify him or direct his life simply by being able to sidestep them. John Nash broke the code of his own illness, and in doing so may have paved the way for a new generation of understanding of what constitutes mental illness and how it can best be treated.