Table of Contents: A Beautiful Mind

Author: Sylvia Nasar
Publisher/Year: Simon & Schuster, 1998
Synopsis: How could you, a mathematician, believe that extraterrestrials were sending you messages?" the visitor from Harvard asked the West Virginian with the movie-star looks and Olympian manner.

"Because the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did," came the answer. "So I took them seriously."

Thus begins the true story of John Nash, the mathematical genius who was a legend by age thirty when he slipped into madness, and who -- thanks to the selflessness of a beautiful woman and the loyalty of the mathematics community -- emerged after decades of ghostlike existence to win a Nobel Prize and world acclaim.

What Others Have To Say
Salon
"Instead of facile theories, the reader enjoys wonder and astonishment -- frightened and intrigued by the intimate juxtaposition of genius and mental illness in a single beautiful mind."

Entertainment Weekly
"Nash's life is as rich and troubled as one would expect from a genius, and Nasar doesn't shy away from her subject's complexity -- or his faults."

The New York Times
"[Nasar] has a special knack for recreating the atmosphere of places like Fine Hall, and for thumbnail sketches of the characters who march through these pages, including many giants of 20th-century mathematics."

The New England Journal of Medicine
"Nasar has written an intriguing account of a fascinating man, of a "beautiful" mind, and of terrible madness. She has also written a deeply moving love story, an account of the centrality of human relationships in a world of nightmare and genius."