BENGALURU: Greatness comes in different forms — some people build empires and conquer kingdoms, some people create timeless art, and some people battle with severe mental illnesses and still manage to be great thinkers. But all people — even the greatest among us — are equal in one way: sooner or later, we all die. And so it was that we lost one of the world’s best mathematicians — John Forbes Nash Jr. — who died along with his wife in a car accident in New Jersey last Saturday. They were 86 and 82 years old respectively.
Now, needless to say, being a mathematician isn’t the most glamorous of professions, and it’s not a career people enter with the hopes of fame and fortune. While their work greatly impacts science, most of their work goes way above the heads of most of us, who only do maths when under severe duress (also known as school), or waiting for precise change at the grocery store.
However, as far as mathematicians go, Nash was something of a celebrity, owing partly to the fact that he made brilliant contributions to game theory, differential geometry, and partial differential equations, and partly to the fact that he made these contributions in spite of his struggles with paranoid schizophrenia, a condition where the patient suffers from paranoid delusions and hallucinations - usually in the form of voices in their head.
His story was documented first by Sylvia Nasar, a journalist who wrote his autobiography, A Beautiful Mind. A film by the same name was later made, starring Russell Crowe as Nash.
For nine years between 1961 to 1970, he spent a time in psychiatric hospitals, where they often forced him to take antipsychotic medicines; however, after 1970, he firmly refused to go back and, contrary to what the film suggests, he recovered on his own, without any more medication. The screenwriter for the film changed this fact, much to Nash’s displeasure, because he was worried about encouraging psych patients to go off medication. Nash, however, firmly believed that psychiatric drugs are overrated and dangerous, choosing instead to recover by waiting it out.
Nash’s wife, Alicia Lopez-Harrison De Lardé, who died with him in the accident, first married him in 1957. Although his illness made it difficult for them to sustain their marriage, eventually ending in divorce, in 1963, she remained close and supportive of him, and he even stayed in her house after 1970, when he was discharged from hospital for the last time. It is said that the support and care she gave Nash saved his life and played a massive role in his recovery. They eventually remarried in 2001. They had a son together from the first time they were married: John Charles Martin Nash. Nash also had another son, John David Stier with a previous girlfriend, Eleanor Stier. He abandoned her when he learned of her pregnancy, allegedly because of class differences.
The crash that took their lives happened in New Jersey, when their taxi driver lost control of the car and crashed into the guardrail while trying to overtake another car. Nash and his wife were thrown out of the car and were pronounced dead at the scene.
He will, no doubt, be remembered as an iconic figure, an inspiration, who overcame all odds and achieved greatness. And he deserves that. But the greatest honour we could do to his memory would be to never forget that he was also a person; just an ordinary man, as flawed as the rest of us, whose struggle was just as difficult and messy as it is for anyone else.
As David Wong once said, “Remember, there are two ways of dehumanising someone: by dismissing them, and by idolising them.” To remember and respect that he, too, was just a man, who had to work extremely hard to achieve all he did, and who wasn’t by any measure perfect, is something we owe him. It’s easy to see someone as a one-dimensional hero. But it takes a moment of thought to see someone — especially a stranger — as a person and appreciate their life in all its fullness and imperfection. And I think he deserves that moment of thought. Rest in peace, James Forbes Nash Jr, and Alicia Nash.