A Beautiful Mind (13 page)

As was to become increasingly obvious over the months that followed, Princeton’s approach to its graduate students, with its combination of complete freedom and relentless pressure to produce, could not have been better suited to someone of Nash’s temperament and style as a mathematician, nor more happily designed to elicit the first real proofs of his genius. Nash’s great luck, if you want to call it luck, was that he came onto the mathematical scene at a time and to a place tailor-made for his particular needs. He came away with his independence, ambition, and originality intact, having been allowed to acquire a truly first-class training that was to serve him brilliantly.

Like nearly all the other graduate students at Princeton, Nash lived in the Graduate College. The College was a gorgeous, faux-English edifice of dark gray stone surrounding an interior courtyard that sat on a crest overlooking a golf course and lake. It was located about a mile from Fine Hall on the far side of Alexander Road, about halfway between Fine and the Institute for Advanced Study. Especially in winter, when it was dark by the time the afternoon seminar ended, it was a good long walk, and once you were there, you didn’t feel like going out again. Its location was the outcome of a fight between Woodrow Wilson and Dean Andrew West.
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Wilson had wanted the graduate students to mix and mingle with the undergraduates. West wanted to re-create the atmosphere of one of the Oxbridge colleges, far removed from the rowdy, snobbish undergraduate eating clubs on Prospect Street.

In 1948, there were about six hundred graduate students, their ranks swelled by the numbers of returning veterans whose undergraduate or graduate careers had been interrupted by the war.
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The College, a bit shabbier than before the war and in need of sprucing up, was full, overflowing really, and a good many less lucky first-year students had been turned away and were being forced to lodge in rented rooms in the village. Almost everyone else had to share rooms. Nash, who lived in Pyne Tower, was lucky to get a private room, one of the perks of his fellowship.
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About fifteen or twenty of the mathematics students, second- and third-year as well as first-year students, and a couple of instructors lived in the college at the time.

Life was masculine, monastic, and scholarly, exactly as Dean West had envisioned.
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The graduate students ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner together at the cost of fourteen dollars a week. Breakfast and lunch were served in the “breakfast” room, hurried meals that were taken on the run. But dinner, served in Procter
Hall, a refectory very much in the English style, was a more leisurely affair. There were tall windows, long wooden tables, and formal portraits of eminent Princetonians on the walls; the evening prayer was led by Sir Hugh Taylor, the college’s dean, or his second in command, the college’s master. There were no candles and no wine, but the food was excellent. Gowns were no longer required as before the war (they were reinstated in the early 1950s, and did not disappear for good until the 1970s), but jackets and ties were required.

The atmosphere at dinner was a combination of male debating society, locker room, and seminary. Though historians, English scholars, physicists, and economists all lived cheek by jowl with the mathematicians, the mathematicians segregated themselves as strictly as if they were living under some legal system of apartheid, always occupying a table by themselves.
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The older, more sophisticated students, namely Harold Kuhn, Leon Henkin, and David Gale, met for sherry in Kuhn’s rooms before dinner. Conversation at dinner, sometimes but not always mathematical, was more expansive than at teatime. The talk, one former student recalls, frequently revolved around “politics, music, and girls.” Political debate resembled discussions about sports, with more calculation of odds and betting than ideology. In that early fall, the Truman-Dewey race provided a great deal of entertainment. Being a more diverse group, the graduate students were more evenly split between the candidates than the Princeton undergraduates; 98 percent of the undergraduates at Princeton, it turned out, were Dewey supporters. One graduate student even wore a Wallace button for Henry Wallace, the candidate supported by the American Labor party, a Communist front organization.
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Girls, or rather the absence of girls, the difficulty of meeting girls, the real or imagined exploits of certain older and more worldly students, were also hot subjects.
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Very few of the students dated. Women were not allowed in the main dining hall, and, of course, there were no female students. “We are all homosexuals here” was a famous remark made by a resident to fluster the dean’s wife.
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Isolation made the real prospects of meeting a girl remote. A few venturesome souls, organized by a young instructor named John Tukey, went to Thursday night folk dances at the local high school.
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But most were too shy and self-conscious to do even that. Sir Hugh, a stuffed shirt roundly disliked by the mathematicians, did his best to discourage what little socializing there was. One student was called into the dean’s office because a pair of women’s panties had been found in his room; it turned out his sister had been visiting and he, to preserve appearances, had moved out for the night. At one point, a seemingly unnecessary rule was handed down that residents of the Graduate College were not allowed to entertain a woman past midnight. The very few students who actually had girlfriends interpreted the rule literally to mean that a woman could be in the room, but couldn’t be entertained. Harold Kuhn spent his honeymoon there.
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The only time and place that women were allowed to join the larger group was Saturday lunch in the Breakfast Room.

In short, social life was rather enveloping — it would be hard to become really lonely — and at the same time limited to other men, in Nash’s case specifically to other mathematicians. The parties held in student rooms were thus mostly all-male
affairs. Such evenings, as often as not, were devoted to mathematical parties organized by
one
of the graduate students at Lefschetz’s request to entertain some visitor but actually to get his students much-needed job contacts.
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The quality, diversity, and sheer volume of mathematics talked about in Princeton every day, by professors, Institute professors, and a steady stream of visitors from all over the world, not to mention the students themselves, were unlike anything Nash had ever imagined, much less experienced. A revolution was taking place in mathematics and Princeton was the center of the action. Topology. Logic. Game theory. There were not only lectures, colloquia, seminars, classes, and weekly meetings at the institute that Einstein and von Neumann occasionally attended, but there were breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and after-dinner parties at the Graduate College, where most of the mathematicians lived, as well as the daily afternoon teas in the common room. Martin Shubik, a young economist studying at Princeton at that time, later wrote that the mathematics department was “electric with ideas and the sheer joy of the hunt. If a stray ten-year-old with bare feet, no tie, torn blue jeans, and an interesting theorem had walked into Fine Hall at tea times, someone would have listened.”
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Tea was the high point of every day.
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It was held in Fine Hall between three and four between the last class and the four-thirty seminar that went until five-thirty or six. On Wednesdays it was held in the west common room, or the professor’s room as it was also called, and was a far more formal affair, where the self-effacing Mrs. Lefschetz and the other wives of the senior faculty, wearing long gowns and white gloves, poured the tea and passed the cookies. Heavy silver teapots and dainty English bone china were brought out.

On other days, tea was held in the east common room, also known as the students’ room, a much-lived-in, funky place full of overstuffed leather armchairs and low tables. The janitor would bring in the tea and cookies a few minutes before three o’clock and the mathematicians, tired from a day of working alone or lecturing or attending seminars, would start drifting in, one by one or in groups. The faculty almost always came, as did most of the graduate students and a sprinkling of more precocious undergraduates. It was very much a family gathering, small and intimate. It is hard to think where a student could get to know as many other mathematicians as well as at Princeton teatime.

The talk was by no means purely formal. Mathematical gossip abounded — who was working on what, who had a nibble from what department, who had run into trouble on his generals. Melvin Hausner, a former Princeton graduate student, later recalled, “You went there to discuss math. To do your own version of gossiping. To meet faculty. To meet friends. We discussed math problems. We shared our readings of recent math papers.”
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The professors felt it their duty to come, not only to get to know the students but to chat with one another. The great logician Alonzo Church, who looked “like a cross between a panda and an owl,” never spoke unless spoken to, and rarely
then, would head straight for the cookies, placing one between the fingers of his splayed hand, and munch away.
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The charismatic algebraist Emil Artin, son of a German opera singer, would fling his gaunt, elegant body into one of the leather armchairs, light a Camel, and opine on Wittgenstein and the like to his disciples, huddled, more or less literally, at his feet.
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The topologist Ralph Fox, a go master, almost always made a beeline for a game board, motioning some student to join him.
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Another topologist, Norman Steenrod, a good-looking, friendly midwesterner who had just created a sensation with his now classic exposition of fiber bundles, usually stopped in for a game of chess.
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Albert Tucker, Lefschetz’s righthand man, was the straitlaced son of a Canadian Methodist minister and Nash’s eventual thesis adviser. Tucker always surveyed the room before he came in and would make fussy little adjustments — such as straightening the curtain weights if the drapes happened to be awry, or issuing a word-to-the-wise to a student who was taking too many cookies.
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More often than not, a few visitors, often from the Institute for Advanced Study, would turn up as well.

The students who gathered at teatime were as remarkable, in a way, as the faculty. Poor Jews, new immigrants, wealthy foreigners, sons of the working classes, veterans in their twenties, and teenagers, the students were a diverse as well as brilliant group, among them John Tate, Serge Lang, Gerard Washnitzer, Harold Kuhn, David Gale, Leon Henkin, and Eugenio Calabi.
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The teas were heaven for the shy, friendless, and socially awkward, a category in which many of these young men belonged. John Milnor, the most brilliant freshman in the history of the Princeton mathematics department, described it this way: “Everything was new to me. I was awkward socially, shy and isolated. Everything was wonderful. This was a whole new world. Here was a whole community in which I felt very much at home.”
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The atmosphere was, however, as competitive as it was friendly.
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Insults and one-upmanship were always major ingredients in teatime banter. The common room was where the young bucks warily sized each other up, bluffed and postured, and locked horns. No culture was more hierarchical than mathematical culture in its precise ranking of individual merit and prestige, yet it was a ranking always in a state of suspense and flux, in which new challenges and scuffles erupted almost daily. Back in their undergraduate colleges, most of these young men had gotten used to being the brightest and best, but now they were bumping up against the brightest and best from other schools. One of the graduate students who entered with Nash admitted, “Competitiveness, it was sort of like breathing. We thrived on it. We were nasty. This guy, he’s dumb, we’d say. Therefore he no longer existed.”
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There were cliques, mostly based on fields.
The
clique at the top of the hierarchy was the topology clique, which clustered around Lefschetz, Fox, and Steenrod. Then came analysis, grouped around Lefschetz’s archrival in the department, a civilized and erudite lover of music and art named Bochner. Then came algebra, which consisted of Emil Artin and a handful of anointed followers. Logic, for some reason, was not highly regarded, despite Church’s towering reputation among early pioneers of computer theory. The game theory clique around Tucker
was considered quite déclassé, an anomaly in this ivory tower of pure mathematics. Each clique had its own thoughts about the importance of its subject and its own way of putting the others down.

Nash had never in his life encountered anything like this exotic little mathematical hothouse. It would soon provide him with the emotional and intellectual context he so much needed to express himself.

5
Genius
Princeton, 1948–49

It is good that I did not let myself be influenced.

— L
UDWIG
W
ITTGENSTEIN

K
AI
L
AI
C
HUNG
, a mathematics instructor who had survived the horrors of the Japanese conquest of his native China, was surprised to see the door of the Professors’ Room standing ajar.
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It was usually locked. Kai Lai liked to stop by on the rare occasions when it was open and nobody was about. It had the feel of an empty church, no longer imposing and intimidating as it was in the afternoons when it was crowded with mathematical luminaries, but simply a beautiful sanctuary.