Though the room is almost dark, Nash continues to talk. The setting sun's rays coming in through the window of the ninth floor office in Fine Hall illuminates a single green leaf on an otherwise brittle, brown plant, and the circle of light on Nash's right cheek shrinks, while the left side of his face is already lost in shadow.
Unable to clearly see his expressions, I offer to turn on the light.
"I was looking at that screen saver, and it looks better in the dark," Nash says, squinting his eyes in a way that looks like a facial shrug and forms two tight horizontal slits in an otherwise drooping face.
Different neon-colored geometric shapes alternately appear on a computer across the room from Nash.
"It's OK," he says after a quiet moment, and I walk over to the switch that is next to the door.
When I return, his gaze is still focused on the screen and he only turns to me when I ask another question.
Nash's agreement is typical of his easy-going manner and his actions of the unabashed disregard for the ordinary that has characterized his life.
Two weeks ago, as hundreds of students gathered in a large lecture hall for a chance to appear in a movie starring 'gladiator' Russell Crowe, the quiet, unconventional genius whom the movie is about sat in a small, paper-strewn room at the bottom of campus. Though Hollywood will soon make him famous when "A Beautiful Mind" — based on the biography of Nash by Sylvia Nasar — is released at the end of this year, John Forbes Nash GS '50 began carving his place in the mathematical world as a child, and was officially placed on an international pedestal in 1994 when he won the Nobel Prize in economics.
The making of the movie will parallel Nash's style of success. Just as he has illuminated large, fundamental theories through his own uniquely abstract and intuitive thinking, a big screen blockbuster will evolve from the intricate inner workings of one man's mind.
"If I were to write a book, it would have been entirely different," Nash began, extending a taught, upright palm as he talked equally with his mouth and his hand.
"But when I'm ready to do it, I'll be so old and in such bad health that I won't have the energy."
Nash, whose gray hair was parted neatly to one side, sat with shoulders of a fragile frame slumped in a rolling desk chair. A blue and green shirt, with a white undershirt showing at the top, disappeared into a cuffed pair of khakis. The bottom of the pants, meanwhile, ended halfway up his calves, allowing a patch of pale skin to peek out over his socks. While his feet displayed New Balance tan walking sneakers, red and black pens were tucked into his left shirt pocket.
While Nash raised his eyebrows when he mentioned the breadth of Nasar's research in writing his biography, he questioned any person's ability to know what went on in his mind.
Both before and during a 30-year period of schizophrenia — from which he says he has now recovered — Nash viewed life in dimensions unperceived by the rest of the world.
Like his simple Princeton homepage — which lists only his contact information and broad research interests — for Nash, general categories of ideas only represent a point of embarkation towards more valuable deviations.
As we talked, the pattern of conversation veered off in unexpected directions, often taking tangents to the main topic.
"I got an entertainment lawyer who made a deal with a particular director," Nash said about the movie. He then proceeded to discuss Universal Pictures' management history, as though he had recently done research on the Internet.
When asked about his childhood, rather than elaborate on the more typical topic of playful memories, Nash preferred to discuss the geographic advantages of his hometown.
"Anything I would try to say would be arbitrary," said Nash, furrowing his eyebrows as he created circles with his left foot, which was crossed over his right knee.
"Maybe there would be a nice birthday party. A kid can appreciate that you can take a cake with candles and then you can blow out those candles."
But Nash was eager to speak about the town of Bluefield, where he was born. Located at the southern-most border of West Virginia, Bluefield had been labeled "nature's air-conditioned city," by the Chamber of Commerce, Nash noted.
He then proceeded to enumerate other high-altitude cities.
It was in his elementary school years at Bluefield that Nash discovered his aptitude for math. In "A Beautiful Mind," Nasar writes that in reflecting on her son's childhood, Nash's mother remembers a teacher telling her that her son was having trouble with math. Laughing, she said, "He could see ways to solve problems that were different from his teacher's."
"I had an interest in math all along," said Nash. "I liked to do more advanced arithmetic problems. "I knew I was good at that," he added casually.
So in high school, Nash took an extra-curricular math class at the nearby Blue Field College. For college he enrolled at Carnegie-Mellon with the intention of being a chemical engineer.
He chose that field because it was reputed to bring immediate prosperity, Nash explained. But he soon found himself directed towards a less conventional career path.
"It was a matter of doing work neatly rather than thinking," he said of chemical engineering.
"It was like an architect making drawings, but [at least] for an architect the drawing is really secondary."
So midway through his freshman year, Nash switched his major from chemistry to math. And it was within this new discipline that he was first labeled "genius" by a professor after he proved a famous theorem.
Nash left Carnegie-Mellon to attend graduate school at Princeton, where the academic climate was fraught with the energetic genius of Albert Einstein and John von Neumann, the mathematician who helped to create the modern computer and develop the theory behind the H-bomb.
It was here at Princeton, during his second year, Nash wrote his nobel-winning thesis on game theory — building on original work by von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern, a Princeton economist.
The premise behind the theory was to develop mathematical principles regulating rivalries. While von Neumann had developed a theory in which one side gained while the other side lost, Nash discovered that mutual gain was also possible.
"It wasn't until Nash that game theory came alive for economists," MIT economics professor and Nobel laureate Robert Solow noted in Nasar's book.
After earning his doctorate from Princeton in 1950, Nash taught at MIT for a few years. But in the latter part of the 1950s, Nash became sick.
While schizophrenia usually attacks people in their teens and early twenties — "as they are about to spread their wings," according to Nasar in a New York Times article preceding her book — "Mr. Nash was struck when he had already begun to soar."
But through the support of his family — who gave him the comfort of a home — and peers such as Princeton math professor Harold Kuhn, who gave him access to facilities on the Princeton campus, Nash became one of the 10 to 20 percent of schizophrenics who eventually recover.
Though it was one of the first times Nash had agreed to an interview, he slouched in his chair with legs outstretched as he talked about his mental illness.
"It's something of a mystery," Nash said. "It's a special area where smart thinking and crazy thinking can be related. If you're going to develop exceptional ideas it requires a type of thinking that is not simply practical thinking."
Nash then added that he feels it is unlikely that he will go back into a schizophrenic state of mind. In 1996, he traveled to a Madrid conference hosted by World of Psychiatry Association to lecture on his illness.
But while he was ill, Nash said that his life was one of ascetism.
"I fell that someone who is mentally ill might not be suffering any more than a monk or a nun who has some type of renunciation," he explained. "A person becomes recognized as mentally disturbed and then they don't have the same kind of social life."
But though he fell into obscurity during the time of his mental illness, the impact of Nash's academic accomplishments continued to diffuse through the mathematical and economic worlds.
"[Nash's theories] are very fundamental for truth and life in a general sense and so fundamental that a 15- year old learned about it in a class at the University of Iowa," said Drew Dillman '01, a mathematics major.
"I knew Nash's name before I knew any other Princeton professor," Dillman added. "Whenever Nash is 'cited' it's a really big deal."
While Dillman claimed that people in the math department rarely receive due recognition, a series of articles about Nash are taped to a board on the third floor in Fine, near a lounge for faculty and students. But Nash's fame will soon extend beyond the mathematical and economic sphere.
"The story is so rich and it has so many dimensions, and it has the human element," said Nasar, mentioning that a PBS documentary will follow the making of the film.
"Usually the only time we hear about schizophrenia is when there are people like the unibomber," she added. "They're not typical of the people who suffer from this disease."
Yet Nash has far exceeded the definition of "typical." As Nasar writes in the prologue to her book, Nash's story is "about the mystery of the human mind, in three acts: genius, madness, reawakening."
And for Nash, that reawakening includes not a celebration of fame — but days filled with attending department lectures on new mathematical ideas and sitting at his computer working on new projects related to game theory, while covering backs of envelopes with names and numbers.
That reawakening includes the return to a beautiful and brilliant mind that seems never to have gone to sleep.
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