John Forbes Nash, Jr. (played by Russell Crowe in the film) was a child prodigy.

While other boys his age were playing childhood games, John was reading E.T. Bell s Men of Mathematics. Learning more at home than he did at school, the young lad was able to solve some of math s most difficult problems. Studying at Princeton University, Nash was undaunted by other brilliant students and professors. At twenty-one, he wrote a doctoral thesis which eventually made him a Nobel Laureate. Falling in love with Alicia Larde (Jennifer Connelly), one of his graduate students at M.I.T., Nash married and soon had a son, John Charles Martin Nash. The family's world, however, had already fallen apart. John Nash, thirty-year-old mathematician, was now John Nash, paranoid schizophrenic. Time passed. Two decades which might have been devoted to consistent, on-going mathematical work slipped away. But even while Nash was unable to run a classroom, he still produced amazing results in his chosen field. Alicia, Princeton and John s family and friends stood by him. They gave him love and provided a familiar environment. Then, accomplishing what so few people have ever been able to do, Nash willed himself to get well. In 1994, at the age of 66, he shared the Nobel for work he did as a graduate student. Most of his colleagues have said that his dissertation, for which he was honored, is far less sophisticated than his later work. In this story behind the movie, meet John Nash and Alicia Larde Nash. Watch a video in which the famous professor explains the influence of mathematics in his life - and how he viewed such things even when he was ill. Take a trip to Princeton to see what life was like for Nash when he studied at that university. Hear what he had to say when he won the Nobel Prize. Learn about paranoid schizophrenia. Examine what scientists have determined about its development and treatment. And ... discover how the condition impacts the person who has it and the lives of friends and family who try to be supportive. The story of Nobel prize winner John Forbes Nash, Jr. proves that psychiatrists are wrong about schizophrenia being a brain disease like Alzheimers and Parkinson's. The movie about Nash, a Beautiful Mind, starring actor Russell Crowe, is a misleading distortion of his story. In his early twenties, Nash was internationally recognized as a mathematical genius. While in graduate school at Princeton University he developed a brilliant new economic model about the ways that people and groups reach bargaining agreements. His fame increased as he worked as a young professor and an associate at the Rand Corporation. At the age of thirty, however, he developed delusions about getting messages from space and was diagnosed as having paranoid schizophrenia. In looking back at what happened, Nash says, "my ideas about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously." His wife, Alicia, had him involuntary admitted to a psychiatric hospital fro treatment half a dozen times in the 1960's, but after those experiences he adamantly refused further hospital treatment and medications. He described his insulin shock treatments as torture and the medications as making him "foggy." He was appalled at what he saw happening to mental hospital patients. From that time on, he refused hospitalization, psychiatric treatment, and medications. He lost his teaching position and his job at Rand. For about ten years he drifted around the United States and Europe. Although Alicia divorced him, she always cared for him deeply and later invited him to move into her home near Princeton. For the next twenty years he walked the halls and corridors at Princeton, where he became known as the Phantom. At night he would write mathematical formulas and strange messages on blackboards. Faculty members and the administration at Princeton felt a benign, protective toleration for him. They told concerned students that Nash was a legendary genius who had "flipped out."

In the motion picture about Nash, a Beautiful Mind, actor Russell Crowe does a superb job acting out psychiatry's beliefs about schizophrenia. Director Ron Howard and actor Russell Crowe followed what the consulting psychiatrists think schizophrenia is. They did not seek input from John Nash, however, even though they shot the film at Princeton where Nash teaches. Crowe met Nash once during the filming when Nash walked by to see what they were doing. Sylvia Nasar, author of a Beautiful Mind, her award winning book about Nash, says that the movie is "a fictionalized version" of her book. (Newsweek, March 8, 2002, p. 52.) The film distorts Nash's true story in two significant ways. One is that he never had hallucinations (featured prominently in the movie), he had delusions (of getting messages from space.) Second, the movie incorrectly portrays him as controlling his symptoms by taking medications. The truth is that at the age of sixty, over thirty years after his mental breakdown, all traces of his so-called schizophrenia disappeared with no medications. Nash wrote in 1995, "Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally induced lines of thinking that had been characteristic of my orientation." And in 1996, "I emerged from irrational thinking, ultimately, without medicine other than the natural hormonal processes of aging." Nash resumed teaching university courses in mathematics, and was regarded by all as a fully recovered. With his sanity returned, the Nobel prize committee awarded him the Nobel prize in economics in 1994 for the brilliant contributions he made as a young man. A Beautiful Mind A Beautiful Mind is a touching, emotionally charged film detailing the life of a brilliant academic who suffers from schizophrenia. This affliction slowly takes over his mind and we watch as his life crumbles apart around him. He abandons his students, alienates his colleagues and replaces his research with a fruitless and all-consuming obsession. Eventually he is taken into hospital where he is forced, with the help of electric-shock therapy and regular medication, to accept his condition and attempt to repair the shattered fragments of his life. He succeeds. Of course he succeeds, this is Hollywood and Hollywood likes a happy ending. In this case the happy ending is that, as an old man and after years of struggle, the poor academic is awarded the Nobel Prize. One interesting point though; it's a true story and our hero is none other than John Forbes Nash Jr. As a young man, John Nash was a mathematical genius. In 1947 he went to Princeton on a Carnegie Scholarship, and after three years had produced a 27-page dissertation for his doctorate in which he greatly expanded the field of Game Theory, transporting it from a position of relative obscurity into one of almost universal relevance. In the 1920s the father of Game Theory, Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann, had shown that mathematical models could be used to explain the behaviour of players in simple games. His work was limited in scope however, and although interesting, it appeared to be of little practical use. Nash's dissertation expanded on von Neumann's work, showing how Game Theory could explain complex as well as simple competitive behaviour. It wasn't a comprehensive solution to all game situations, but it did lay the foundations for the huge body of work on Game Theory which has been produced since. Unfortunately, very little of this comes across in A Beautiful Mind because the director (Ron Howard) seems more interested in making a film about a schizophrenic than a mathematician suffering from schizophrenia. At the start of the film we are shown a Hollywood template of a typically obsessive young academic, introverted, socially inept, dismissive of his colleagues' work. If the notes we see Nash scribbling on his windows were chemical formulae or rhyming couplets rather than mathematical equations, the character would have seemed equally plausible. This is not to say that Russell Crowe, who plays Nash, does a bad job. Indeed, he succeeds in giving his character a convincing plausibility rarely seen in mainstream cinema these days, and he was certainly a deserving Oscar nominee. It's just that we never see him doing any maths apart from the occasional scribbling on windows.

And when his great breakthrough finally comes, Nash is not poring over his books in the library or gazing fixedly at his glass equivalent of a blackboard, he's in a bar, eyeing up a group of attractive young women. How visually convenient.