kartooner

Many of us remem­ber the movie, A Beau­ti­ful Mind, win­ning Best Pic­ture of the Year in the Acad­emy Awards in 2002. How­ever, what most peo­ple don’t real­ize (or the ones I’ve talked to) is that the real John F. Nash, Jr. is some­what dif­fer­ent from the char­ac­ter of the same name in the movie depic­tion of his life.

For instance, many of the sequences in the movie were exag­ger­ated for the typ­i­cal Hol­ly­wood effect of instill­ing emo­tion and drama within a 2-hour time frame. The movie was inspired of course by the life of John Nash as writ­ten in the biog­ra­phy “A Beau­ti­ful Mind: The Life of Math­e­mat­i­cal Genius and Nobel Lau­re­ate John Nash” by author Sylvia Nasar.

How­ever, a man’s life is best told through his own words:

My begin­ning as a legally rec­og­nized indi­vid­ual occurred on June 13, 1928 in Blue­field, West Vir­ginia, in the Blue­field San­i­tar­ium, a hos­pi­tal that no longer exists. Of course I can’t con­sciously remem­ber any­thing from the first two or three years of my life after birth. (And, also, one sus­pects, psy­cho­log­i­cally, that the ear­li­est mem­o­ries have become “mem­o­ries of mem­o­ries” and are com­pa­ra­ble to tra­di­tional folk tales passed on by tellers and lis­ten­ers from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion.) But facts are avail­able when direct mem­ory fails for many cir­cum­stances.” (John F. Nash, Jr.)

http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1994/nash-autobio.html