(Winner of the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography; finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Rhône-Poulenc Prize) Sylvia Nasar's now-classic biography explores the meteoric rise and tragic fall of mathematical genius John Forbes Nash Jr. As a graduate student he made contributions to game theory that ultimately revolutionized the field of economics; as an MIT professor he solved a series of deep problems most mathematicians deemed impossible; yet at the age of 30 Nash suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown. The inspiration for the film of the same name, A Beautiful Mind traces Nash's slow recovery and return to mathematics, culminating in his winning the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994.
"A splendid book, deeply interesting and extraordinarily moving, remarkable for its sympathetic insights into both genius and schizophrenia."—Oliver Sacks
