10. John Nash won the Nobel Prize for his work on game theory and battled schizophrenia for decades
The late John Nash (1928-2015) was a Nobel Prize-winning mathematician. Over his long career, he lectured at both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Princeton and made significant contributions to game theory. He is the only person to have been awarded both the Abel Prize and Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. In the words of the eminent Mikhail Leonidovich Gromov, Nash’s work ‘opened a new world of mathematics that stretches in front of our eyes in yet unknown directions and still waits to be explored’. The world will be celebrating Nash and his work for centuries to come.
But as anyone who has seen the Oscar-winning biography of Nash, A Beautiful Mind, will know, Nash suffered from paranoid schizophrenia from the 1950s. This first manifested in his belief that there was a Communist conspiracy against him, but his struggles became public when he received gave an incomprehensible lecture at Columbia University in 1959, which alarmed his colleagues. Admitted to the McLean Hospital shortly afterwards, he spent much of the next two decades in psychiatric hospitals. When he reached his fifties, however, Nash’s schizophrenia mysteriously disappeared, possibly due to hormonal changes, leaving him free to continue researching unhindered.
By his own admission, at first, he could not accept that he was unwell. ‘I spent times of the order of five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis and always attempting a legal argument for release… [until] I had been long enough hospitalized that I would finally renounce my delusional hypotheses and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to mathematical research, he said in 1994. Nonetheless, he also stated that, ‘I wouldn’t have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally’.