“美丽心灵”其人其事
The Man Behind A Beautiful Mind
作者：朱江　译 文章来源：Newsweek 阅读：427次 发布时间：2006-8-11 9:43:47
电影"美丽心灵"上演之后，不断有喜欢这部影片的观众向我打听了解生活中真正的Nash其人其事，他当时病情有多严重？是怎样康复的？现在情况怎么样？他们知道1998年我为诺贝尔奖得主John Nash写过传记，而电影"美丽心灵"正是根据这部传记改编的。 Since "A Beautiful Mind" opened, people who loved the movie but know that it is a fictionalized version of my 1998 biography of Nobel laureate John Nash have been asking me about the real Nash: How sick was he? How did he recover? How is he now?   几周前，Nash和我参加了普林斯顿研究院的鸡尾酒会。大家津津有味地听他调侃完票房收入情况后，Nash风趣地说他希望环球公司的帐能做得比安然公司好。看着眼前这位73岁高龄的老人，你很难相信就在15年前他还是重病缠身，前牙溃烂，穿着色彩搭配不协调的格子呢衣默默无声地出没在普林斯顿校园，他不和任何人交谈，也不敢正眼看人。 A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO, Nash and I were at a cocktail party at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. After regaling his listeners with box-office results, Nash joked that he hoped Universal1 was doing a better job of keeping its books than Enron2. Watching this 73-year-old gentleman, you'd find it hard to believe that 15 years ago he was so sick that he was haunting the Princeton campus in mismatched plaids, speaking to no one, afraid to look anyone in the eye, his front teeth rotted.   从某种程度上来看，Nash得的是典型的偏执型精神分裂症。有的同事认为他在读研究生时就出现了该病的一些早期症状，但到了30岁才完全暴露出来。1959年，就在他即将被晋升为麻省理工院全职教授时，他却告诉竞争对手所在系的系主任他不能接受这个职位，因为"我注定要成为南极的皇帝"。他认为自己是"一个肩负重大神秘使命的救世主"。他发疯般逐字逐句地看《纽约时报》，说是要寻找来自外星人的密信，天天乱拨收音机，说是要找来自太空的信号。 In some ways, Nash's illness was a classic case of paranoid schizophrenia. Some of his peers were convinced that the early stages of the illness manifested themselves in graduate school, but the full-blown symptoms did not erupt until he was 30. In 1959, just as he was about to be promoted to full professor at MIT, he told the chairman of a rival department that he wouldn't be able to accept an offer because "I am scheduled to become the emperor of Antarctica". Convinced that he was "a messianic figure of great but secret importance," he frantically scanned The New York Times　for encoded messages from aliens, and fiddled with radio dials to pick up signals from space.   不知从什么时候起，他开始产生了听觉上的幻觉。虽然他没有亲眼看见谁在对他喊叫，但这些声音对他来说就象街上的行人一样真实。作为一个年轻的数学家，他脑海里会涌现出数学解式，但他却迟迟说不出推理过程，因为这都是他一时的直觉，是非理性的。他说产生幻觉时，"就象我当初产生数学概念一样，我会产生有关超自然力量的念头，所以我会拿它们当真。" At some point, he began hearing voices. Though he didn't literally see the figures who were shouting at him, the voices were as real to him as people on the street. As a young mathematician, he saw mathematical solutions-nonrational flashes of intuition-long before he could work out the reasoning. After the delusions and hallucinations took over, he said, "My ideas about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously."   Nash对六十年代精神病疗法的反应很强烈，这种疗法粗暴，有时还十分危险。他曾多次被强制住院治疗，1961年他被监禁在Trenton州立医院，医生连续六周天天为他注射胰岛素，以使他处于昏迷状态，他们希望用这种休克疗法把Nash的大脑恢复正常。以后医生又用抗精神病药物Stelasine治疗他。Nash说胰岛素休克疗法是一种"折磨"，抱怨Stelasine让他迷迷糊糊（这些都是事实）。 Nash responded dramatically to treatments available in the 1960s-crude and sometimes dangerous as these were. He was hospitalized half a dozen times, always involuntarily. At Trenton State, where he was incarcerated in 1961, he was injected with insulin and put into a coma daily for six weeks by physicians who hoped to shock Nash's brain back to health. Later he was treated with antipsychotics like Stelazine. He described the insulin shock as "torture," and blamed Stelazine for making him "foggy" (both true).   与许多精神分裂症患者一样，Nash认为自己没病。病情加重时，他指责妻子Alicia想把他关起来。身心憔悴的Alicia艰难地抚养着儿子，1963年终于获准与Nash离婚。1965年，Nash移居波士顿，希望在那里开始新的生活。但是他没有坚持服药，再度发病，最终搬到了弗吉利亚州的Roanoke，与他母亲生活在一起。当时，40岁的Nash已是白发苍苍，虚弱不堪，照镜子时，镜子里的他"与死人没什么两样"。他整天躲在母亲公寓里喝着台湾乌龙茶，闭门不出，无所事事。 Like so many people who suffer from schizophrenia, Nash did not believe that he was sick. As his illness deepened, he accused his wife, Alicia, of wanting to lock him away. Exhausted and depressed, struggling to raise their son, Alicia obtained a divorce in 1963. In 1965 he moved to Boston, where he hoped to begin his life afresh. But he stopped taking medication, relapsed and finally wound up living in Roanoke, Va., with his mother. At 40, gray-haired and frail, he saw "a cadaver almost" when he looked at himself in the mirror. He spent his days sipping Formosa oolong in his mother's apartment.   Nash从未停止过对Alicia的思念，Alicia也从没有真的忘了他。1970年母亲去世后，Nash写信给Alicia，恳求她收留他。出乎意料，她居然同意了。Nash又回到了普林斯顿，学生们只知道他是"Fine楼的幽灵"--一位沉默不语的怪人，总在黑板上乱写一些古怪而又富有哲理的东西。 Nash never stopped pining for Alicia, and she never really let him go. After his mother's death in 1970, he wrote to Alicia and begged her to shelter him. Astonishingly, she agreed. He moved back to Princeton, where students knew him only as the Phantom of Fine Hall, a mute figure who scribbled weird but witty messages on blackboards.   观众一定会很惊讶，象Closapine一类的高效新药对Nash的康复并没有起到任何作用，显然另一种化学因素起了作用。Nash没有服药，但如他自述的那样，"是随年龄增长而产生的荷尔蒙变化帮助他最终恢复了理智"，像Nash这样幸运的精神分裂症患者约占患者总数的不足十分之一。目前人们尚不清楚为什么少数幸运的患者中年后期症状会明显减轻。 Moviegoers will be surprised to learn that powerful new drugs like clozapine played no role in Nash's recovery. Another kind of chemistry apparently did, however. Like fewer than one in 10 individuals who suffer from chronic schizophrenia, Nash "emerged from irrational thinking ultimately without medicine other than the natural hormonal changes of aging," as he later put it. No one knows why a lucky minority experience a dramatic lessening of symptoms in late middle age.   事到如今，Nash有时还能听到过去那些声音，但是现在他已学会对此不予理睬了。他说："这种病与其说象是如梦方醒，不如说更象是一个持续不断的过程。"当其他诺贝尔奖得主用自己奖金坐着头等舱飞来飞去或热衷于慈善事业时，Nash却重新开始了自己的研究，最高荣誉奖的用途也很简单：能去星巴克咖啡店喝杯咖啡，考张驾照，最重要的是担起家庭的重任，包括抚养同样患有精神分裂症的儿子--悲剧的重演。 Even today Nash sometimes hears the old voices. But now he has learned to ignore them. "It's like a continuous process rather than waking up from a dream," he has said. Other Nobel laureates fly first class or start charities with their prize money. For Nash, who is doing research again, the most prized emoluments are simpler: being able to afford a cup of coffee at Starbucks3, getting a driver's license and, most important, providing for his family-including a son who also suffers from schizophrenia-once more.   去年6月复婚仪式上，Nash 亲吻Alicia 之前妙语连珠："我们是梅开二度，就象演电影一样。" "A second take!" he quipped before kissing Alicia when they remarried last June. "Just like a movie."

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Autobiography(by John F. Nash Jr.)

My beginning as a legally recognized individual occurred on June 13, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia, in the Bluefield Sanitarium, a hospital that no longer exists. Of course I can't consciously remember anything from the first two or three years of my life after birth. (And, also, one suspects, psychologically, that the earliest memories have become "memories of memories" and are comparable to traditional folk tales passed on by tellers and listeners from generation to generation.) But facts are available when direct memory fails for many circumstances.

My father, for whom I was named, was an electrical engineer and had come to Bluefield to work for the electrical utility company there which was and is the Appalachian Electric Power Company. He was a veteran of WW1 and had served in France as a lieutenant in the supply services and consequently had not been in actual front lines combat in the war. He was originally from Texas and had obtained his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Texas Agricultural and Mechanical (Texas A. and M.).

My mother, originally Margaret Virginia Martin, but called Virginia, was herself also born in Bluefield. She had studied at West Virginia University and was a school teacher before her marriage, teaching English and sometimes Latin. But my mother's later life was considerably affected by a partial loss of hearing resulting from a scarlet fever infection that came at the time when she was a student at WVU.

Her parents had come as a couple to Bluefield from their original homes in western North Carolina. Her father, Dr. James Everett Martin, had prepared as a physician at the University of Maryland in Baltimore and came to Bluefield, which was then expanding rapidly in population, to start up his practice. But in his later years Dr. Martin became more of a real estate investor and left actual medical practice. I never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born but I have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house which was located rather centrally in Bluefield.

A sister, Martha, was born about two and a half years later than me on November 16, 1930.

I went to the standard schools in Bluefield but also to a kindergarten before starting in the elementary school level. And my parents provided an encyclopedia, Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia, that I learned a lot from by reading it as a child. And also there were other books available from either our house or the house of the grandparents that were of educational value.

Bluefield, a small city in a comparatively remote geographical location in the Appalachians, was not a community of scholars or of high technology. It was a center of businessmen, lawyers, etc. that owed its existence to the railroad and the rich nearby coal fields of West Virginia and western Virginia. So, from the intellectual viewpoint, it offered the sort of challenge that one had to learn from the world's knowledge rather than from the knowledge of the immediate community.

By the time I was a student in high school I was reading the classic "Men of Mathematics" by E.T. Bell and I remember succeeding in proving the classic Fermat theorem about an integer multiplied by itself p times where p is a prime.

I also did electrical and chemistry experiments at that time. At first, when asked in school to prepare an essay about my career, I prepared one about a career as an electrical engineer like my father. Later, when I actually entered Carnegie Tech. in Pittsburgh I entered as a student with the major of chemical engineering.

Regarding the circumstances of my studies at Carnegie (now Carnegie Mellon U.), I was lucky to be there on a full scholarship, called the George Westinghouse Scholarship. But after one semester as a chem. eng. student I reacted negatively to the regimentation of courses such as mechanical drawing and shifted to chemistry instead. But again, after continuing in chemistry for a while I encountered difficulties with quantitative analysis where it was not a matter of how well one could think and understand or learn facts but of how well one could handle a pipette and perform a titration in the laboratory. Also the mathematics faculty were encouraging me to shift into mathematics as my major and explaining to me that it was not almost impossible to make a good career in America as a mathematician. So I shifted again and became officially a student of mathematics. And in the end I had learned and progressed so much in mathematics that they gave me an M. S. in addition to my B. S. when I graduated.

I should mention that during my last year in the Bluefield schools that my parents had arranged for me to take supplementary math. courses at Bluefield College, which was then a 2-year institution operated by Southern Baptists. I didn't get official advanced standing at Carnegie because of my extra studies but I had advanced knowledge and ability and didn't need to learn much from the first math. courses at Carnegie.

When I graduated I remember that I had been offered fellowships to enter as a graduate student at either Harvard or Princeton. But the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous since I had not actually won the Putnam competition and also Princeton seemed more interested in getting me to come there. Prof. A.W. Tucker wrote a letter to me encouraging me to come to Princeton and from the family point of view it seemed attractive that geographically Princeton was much nearer to Bluefield. Thus Princeton became the choice for my graduate study location.

But while I was still at Carnegie I took one elective course in "International Economics" and as a result of that exposure to economic ideas and problems, arrived at the idea that led to the paper "The Bargaining Problem" which was later published in Econometrical. And it was this idea which in turn, when I was a graduate student at Princeton, led to my interest in the game theory studies there which had been stimulated by the work of von Neumann and Morgenstern.

As a graduate student I studied mathematics fairly broadly and I was fortunate enough, besides developing the idea which led to "Non-Cooperative Games", also to make a nice discovery relating to manifolds and real algebraic varieties. So I was prepared actually for the possibility that the game theory work would not be regarded as acceptable as a thesis in the mathematics department and then that I could realize the objective of a Ph.D. thesis with the other results.

But in the event the game theory ideas, which deviated somewhat from the "line" (as if of "political party lines") of von Neumann and Morgenstern's book, were accepted as a thesis for a mathematics Ph.D. and it was later, while I was an instructor at M.I.T., that I wrote up Real Algebraic Manifolds and sent it in for publication.

I went to M.I.T. in the summer of 1951 as a "C.L.E. Moore Instructor". I had been an instructor at Princeton for one year after obtaining my degree in 1950. It seemed desirable more for personal and social reasons than academic ones to accept the higher-paying instructorship at M.I.T.

I was on the mathematics faculty at M.I.T. from 1951 through until I resigned in the spring of 1959. During academic 1956 - 1957 I had an Alfred P. Sloan grant and chose to spend the year as a (temporary) member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

During this period of time I managed to solve a classical unsolved problem relating to differential geometry which was also of some interest in relation to the geometric questions arising in general relativity. This was the problem to prove the isometric embeddability of abstract Riemannian manifolds in flat (or "Euclidean") spaces. But this problem, although classical, was not much talked about as an outstanding problem. It was not like, for example, the 4-color conjecture.

So as it happened, as soon as I heard in conversation at M.I.T. about the question of the embeddability being open I began to study it. The first break led to a curious result about the embeddability being realizable in surprisingly low-dimensional ambient spaces provided that one would accept that the embedding would have only limited smoothness. And later, with "heavy analysis", the problem was solved in terms of embeddings with a more proper degree of smoothness.

While I was on my "Sloan sabbatical" at the IAS in Princeton I studied another problem involving partial differential equations which I had learned of as a problem that was unsolved beyond the case of 2 dimensions. Here, although I did succeed in solving the problem, I ran into some bad luck since, without my being sufficiently informed on what other people were doing in the area, it happened that I was working in parallel with Ennio de Giorgi of Pisa, Italy. And de Giorgi was first actually to achieve the ascent of the summit (of the figuratively described problem) at least for the particularly interesting case of "elliptic equations".

It seems conceivable that if either de Giorgi or Nash had failed in the attack on this problem (of a priori estimates of Holder continuity) then that the lone climber reaching the peak would have been recognized with mathematics' Fields medal (which has traditionally been restricted to persons less than 40 years old).

Now I must arrive at the time of my change from scientific rationality of thinking into the delusional thinking characteristic of persons who are psychiatrically diagnosed as "schizophrenic" or "paranoid schizophrenic". But I will not really attempt to describe this long period of time but rather avoid embarrassment by simply omitting to give the details of truly personal type.

While I was on the academic sabbatical of 1956-1957 I also entered into marriage. Alicia had graduated as a physics major from M.I.T. where we had met and she had a job in the New York City area in 1956-1957. She had been born in El Salvador but came at an early age to the U.S. and she and her parents had long been U.S. citizens, her father being an M. D. and ultimately employed at a hospital operated by the federal government in Maryland.

The mental disturbances originated in the early months of 1959 at a time when Alicia happened to be pregnant. And as a consequence I resigned my position as a faculty member at M.I.T. and, ultimately, after spending 50 days under "observation" at the McLean Hospital, travelled to Europe and attempted to gain status there as a refugee.

I later spent times of the order of five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis and always attempting a legal argument for release.

And it did happen that when I had been long enough hospitalized that I would finally renounce my delusional hypotheses and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to mathematical research. In these interludes of, as it were, enforced rationality, I did succeed in doing some respectable mathematical research. Thus there came about the research for "Le Probleme de Cauchy pour les E'quations Differentielles d'un Fluide Generale"; the idea that Prof. Hironaka called "the Nash blowing-up transformation"; and those of "Arc Structure of Singularities" and "Analyticity of Solutions of Implicit Function Problems with Analytic Data".

But after my return to the dream-like delusional hypotheses in the later 60's I became a person of delusionally influenced thinking but of relatively moderate behavior and thus tended to avoid hospitalization and the direct attention of psychiatrists.

Thus further time passed. Then gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.

So at the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health. One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos. For example, a non-Zoroastrian could think of Zarathustra as simply a madman who led millions of naive followers to adopt a cult of ritual fire worship. But without his "madness" Zarathustra would necessarily have been only another of the millions or billions of human individuals who have lived and then been forgotten.

Statistically, it would seem improbable that any mathematician or scientist, at the age of 66, would be able through continued research efforts, to add much to his or her previous achievements. However I am still making the effort and it is conceivable that with the gap period of about 25 years of partially deluded thinking providing a sort of vacation my situation may be atypical. Thus I have hopes of being able to achieve something of value through my current studies or with any new ideas that come in the future.

From Les Prix Nobel. The Nobel Prizes 1994, Editor Tore Frängsmyr, [Nobel Foundation], Stockholm, 1995

This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.

 

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