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Economist
Professor Author, A Beautiful Mind
Profile
The movie inspired by Sylvia Nasar’s award-winning #1 New York Times bestseller, A Beautiful Mind, has enthralled audiences around the world and helped put a human face on a devastating mental illness. One of the most critically-acclaimed Hollywood films of recent years, A Beautiful Mind won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actress and Screenplay.
Nasar discovered the remarkable story of Nobel Laureate John Nash as an economics reporter for the New York Times. A business journalist who had been a staff writer at Fortune and a columnist at U.S. News & World Report, she was fascinated both by Nash’s intellectual achievements and his extraordinary triumph over schizophrenia. Her story, “The Lost Years of the Nobel Laureate,” depicted his life as a drama about the mystery of the mind in three acts: genius, madness, reawakening.
 We got great feedback, she was so gracious, she has tremendous warmth for her subject and we were very moved by her |
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Nasar’s biography won the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and was a Pulitzer finalist in 1998. Four years later, A Beautiful Mind once again attracted national attention, this time as a box-office blockbuster directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe.
Nasar’s book is a beautifully crafted exploration of the life and mind of John Nash, an intellectual giant in the generation that drove science and mathematics to the forefront of American consciousness. In a 27-page Ph.D. thesis for which he won a Nobel in economics decades later, the eccentric 21-year old invented a theory that has transformed modern social science and been applied to everything from business strategy and warfare to the evolution of the species and international trade.
Nash proved to be “the most remarkable mathematician of the second half of the century.” But at age 30, a celebrity in the rarefied world of mathematics and seemingly on the verge of more breakthroughs, Nash’s beautiful mind betrayed him. The source of his stunning original insights became that of bizarre delusions and terrifying hallucinations.
For 30 years, Nash was known as the Phantom of Fine Hall at Princeton University. Schizophrenia had robbed him of everything except the love of a beautiful woman and the loyalty of a handful of colleagues. Then suddenly, after three decades, Nash slowly woke up, and the recognition of his great work, long denied because of his illness, culminated in the Nobel Prize.
Nasar is the first Knight Professor of Business Journalism at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and has been a visiting scholar at Cambridge University and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. She is currently working on a book about 20th century economic thinkers.