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Rating: This is not the review of the beautiful Ron Howard's film. This is the review of something much richer.
Ron Howard's film is undoubtedly splendid, but it ignores too many aspects of Nash's life, before his ultimate fall into schizophrenia. The most important is the fact that Nash, as a child, suffered abuse.
What amazes about Nash is his mathematical bibliography: less than ten articles, almost all published in the “Annals of Mathematics” (the Princeton University math journal that only publishes memorable masterpieces and rejects articles that would immediately garner their authors a professorship at a university).
Nash's first work is a masterpiece: game theory (published in 1950), when John was just 22 years old. In the book, the emphasis that is placed in the film and the reason is explained by Misha Gromov, a great Russian mathematician: “Compared to the two subsequent works, the game theory, which earned him the Nobel Prize, is a trivial little thing”.
The first of these subsequent works deals with “Immersion of Manifolds,” a gigantic problem of differential geometry posed in 1800 by Bernard Riemann (among the top 5 mathematicians of all time), which Riemann, due to his death at just 40 years old, was unable to solve. Nash solved it, and it is also mentioned in Howard's film.
The second work deals with the so-called “parabolic equations,” linked to one of Hilbert's famous problems, a series of 23 problems proposed in 1900 by the great mathematician David Hilbert. Nash solved it by working for 5 months, from 10 PM to 3 AM, 7 days a week. Nasar's account is truly gripping.
In 1958, Nash, just 30 years old, was considered one of the greatest mathematicians in the world. After solving three such enormous problems, he expected the “Fields Medal,” the Nobel Prize for mathematics, which, until 1966, was awarded to two only mathematicians every 4 years.
Unfortunately, no sooner had Nash solved the parabolic equations problem, than he learned that an Italian mathematician, Ennio De Giorgi (considered by many to be the greatest Italian mathematician of the 20th century), had just solved the problem from another perspective. Obviously, a Fields Medal could not be given to two mathematicians who solved the same problem, and thus the Fields commission decided to ignore both Nash, and De Giorgi – who being thirty years old could have won it even 4 years later. Very touching is the way Nasar narrates what happened in the “Fields commission” to induce some to add one more Medal.
This terrible disappointment was certainly at the root of John's depression, and the end of his greatest creativity.
Nash, at this point, out of a foolish sense of revenge, attempted to solve the most important pure mathematics issue: the Riemann Hypothesis, an unsolved problem, concerning the distribution of prime numbers. According to Sylvia Nasar, the extraordinary effort required to solve it from scratch, without much knowledge on the subject, was the cause of his ultimate collapse into schizophrenia.
Since then, for about thirty years, his life was a veritable hell: hallucinations, in and out of psychiatric hospitals, depressions and surges of creativity (he will write some other excellent work). In the film, these thirty years are the centerpiece of the script. In the book they are described, yes, but how can one write about schizophrenia? The film, from this perspective, is clearly superior.
Then, towards the end of the 80s, the miraculous awakening. In the book, it is recounted much better than in the film – although the film is also truly touching. Then the triumph of the Nobel, which in the film is unbeatable.
All psychologists say that it is not possible, for a schizophrenic, to distinguish a delusional thought from a sane thought. Thus the scene in the film where Nash realizes that the girl is not real is merely poetic license. It is not humanly possible, because to realize that the girl is not real “his head would need to work, while the problem is precisely his head not working”.
However, many psychologists admire the technique Nash used to cope with his illness. Here are Nash's words, which are also cited in a beautiful scene in the film, the one with the pens on the table:
“As one does a food diet to lose weight, so I do a thought diet, whether healthy or misguided they may be. I do not allow them to intrude to disturb me”.
A gripping and touching book, an excellent masterpiece-complement to a masterpiece film.
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