REVIEW OF “A BEAUTIFUL MIND”



Review of “A Beautiful Mind”

Review of “A Beautiful Mind”

In the film "A Beautiful Mind", John Nash is portrayed as a very intelligent mathematician. I was very surprised in the end of the movie when I found out that the main characters of the movie were all made up in John's head. My feelings toward the movie were that it was very intriguing that someone could live their entire life as though it was a math problem. It was very sad how someone so smart and brilliant with so much knowledge in one field, could lose his total grip on reality like John Nash did (Andrews, 2008).

The film conveyed that John Nash viewed his life as one large math problem. Everything he did on a daily basis was thought of as a problem and he would have to come up with a mathematical solution. The reason for John going "crazy" was because of this problem he had. John's mind didn't ever stop working or trying to come up with something new to invent. He always wanted to be the first to come up with some amazing theory to apply in math.

Teachers must have an excellent grasp on their subject matter. John knew everything and more there was to know about math. Also, teachers must have patience and a good way of explaining to others. John Nash had a descent amount of patience to teach and many of his students were so impressed and intrigued by what he knew and had to share with them. He held a great relationship with his students because of this (Andrews, 2008).

I personally, would not like to have been a student of John's because I do not have a strong knowledge or passion for math like he did. As for meeting him, I would like to know what runs through his mind and why he has such a passion for his studies.

John Forbes Nash was born in 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia. Having received his BS and MS from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now known as Carnegie Mellon University), he went on to study at Princeton for his doctorate. While he was there he wrote his thesis "Non Cooperative Games" and received his doctorate. His accomplishments included inadvertently proving Brouwers fixed point theorem and inventing a topological game called "Nash".

Nash taught at MIT from 1951-1959 when he lost his job after being struck with the disease, paranoid schizophrenia. At MIT, he worked on the theory of real algebraic varieties, Riemannum geometry, and parabolic and elliptic differential equations. He was called the most promising mathematician in the world before the disease struck (Andrews, 2008).

Miraculously, the disease began to vanish in the 1970's and Nash returned to his mathematical studies. He won a Nobel Prize in 1994 for a paper written in 1949, called "Nash Equilibrium", for strategic non-cooperative games. He followed this up with "Nash Bargaining Solution"(1951) and "Nash Programme" (1952). Nash is now in his seventies and keeps an office at Princeton ...