I just finished reading 'A Beautiful Mind', the biography of mathematician John Nash. I saw the movie last fall, and I had wanted to read the book for a while. The movie does a good job of capturing the essence of the man, but it is not a particularly accurate depiction of his life. John Nash was definitely the competitive prick portrayed in the movie, but his life and his illness were quite a bit different.

For example, Nash was fairly sexually experienced with both men and women by the time he met his wife. He was a tall good looking fellow who had at least two male and one female sexual partners prior to meeting his future wife Alicia. He lost his job with a defense contractor after making a pass at a man in a bathroom, and had an illegitimate child with a nurse in Boston. The movie makes it look like Alicia was the first person to get beyond his standoffishness.

Also, when I watched the movie I knew enough about schizophrenia already to understand that the three imaginary people that kept following him around were unlikely to have existed. The film makers used these figures to give the audience a visual clue of the overwhelming nature of his illness, but it is my understanding that persistent visual illusions of this sort are very rare. The habit of writing mathematical equations on glass was also not in the book.

Furthermore, schizophrenia came on Nash in rush when his wife was pregnant for their son. There were no delusions during the period when he was getting his PhD or any other time prior to his 30th birthday. Within the space of two months he went from brilliant mathematical genius to completely insane schizophrenic. Prior to the onset of his illness he had the reputation of being asocial and inconsiderate but had not manifest any symptoms of schizophrenia. In the movie that gave him an imaginary roommate and had him writing equations down on window panes long before his breakdown.