John nash documentary pbs

Mind Against Itself.

John Nash, central figure in the feature film "A Beautiful Mind", was born in 1928 to parents of no particular note and displayed a fascination with numbers of an intensity that has always eluded me.

A Brilliant Madness | American Experience | PBS

After being graduated from Carnegie Tech he was accepted at Princeton, a hotbed of math inquiry at the time, and completed his doctoral dissertation on game theory at the age of twenty one. It was really a breakthrough study -- the Nash Equilibrium -- but its importance wasn't recognized at the time.

Nash accepted a position at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but quickly suffered what was then called a nervous breakdown and is technically known as paranoid schizophrenia.

It's a disabling and extremely painful disease of the brain. There were no antipsychotic drugs available at the time. His behavior became bizarre. He began receiving messages from outer space and having auditory hallucinations in which voices talked Insights from Producer Randy MacLowry | American Experience | PBS JIVYT