Prologue, Chapters 1-2 Summary and Analysis

John Forbes Nash Jr. came from Bluefield, West Virginia. He became well known as a mathematician in 1948. He was considered to be a genius by many and did a lot of work in the areas of game theory and economic rivalry. He was a pioneer in the area of computer architecture and liked science fiction. His genius eventually caused him to slip into madness, beginning in his thirties.

The first signs of his mental deterioration appeared in 1959 as he became a full professor at MIT. He was thirty years of age when he suffered his first episode of paranoid schizophrenia. He quit teaching and became involved in numerology and religious prophecy. He traveled through Europe and America at this time and spent time in the 1970s and 1980s wandering around the Princeton campus scribbling on blackboards. At...