段德稳博友发表了一篇博文《《A Beautiful Mind》隐瞒了的真相》，看了之后，发现他的立论基础是电影《A Beautiful Mind》。

       我认为，电影发展到现在，除了记录片之外，它们的故事一般不能看作真实的历史。

        与电影《A Beautiful Mind》的“戏说乾隆”风格迥异，纸本《美丽心灵》（A Beautiful Mind，Sylvia Nasar著）是一本写作态度非常严谨的传记作品。虽然我没有仔细阅读，但看了序言与后记及部分内容，就发觉这是一本比较靠谱的传记。中文版校译后记中提到：“作为一本认真的传记著作，全书有2204条注释，主要是说明每一件事、每一句话的出处。典型的注释是：...”。当今的传记作品当中，有多少著述的注释数量与此匹敌呢？

       至于电影，再版后记也提到，电影《A Beautiful Mind》基本上属于戏说，导演本人也明确表示，这不是一部传记片，而是一部虚构作品。

       纳什抛弃第一任结发女友的故事与乔布斯似乎非常相像，可谓人无完人。

       王飞跃先生的博文《纳什是博弈论的创始人？》对中国一些媒体在纳什逝世后声称的“博弈论创始人纳什”进行了批评（http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-2374-893023.html）。可惜王飞跃先生未提及传记著作《A Beautiful Mind》及其他文献依据，只说是是业界常识。我们此处来看看该书对此是如何描述的？该书参考文献中列入了“4. Paul R. Halmos, "The Legend of John von Neumann;`American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 80 (1973), pp. 382-94.  15. John von Neumann, "Zur Theorie der Gesellschaftsspiele," Math. Ann., vol. 100 (1928), pp, 295-320. See also Robert J. Leonard, "From Parlor Games to Social Science: Von Neumann, Morgenstern and the Creation of Came Theory, 1928-1944 Journal of Economic Literature(1995).“ 网页http://www.jstor.org/stable/2729025?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents （《From Parlor Games to Social Science: Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory 1928-1944》）介绍了博弈论的诞生过程。不过，仅有第1页，看不到详细的内容。

       虽然目前我尚不太清楚《A Beautiful Mind》对纳什博弈论贡献的具体表述，但从文献看，传记作者是追求真相的。标题“From Parlor Games to Social Science: Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory 1928-1944”本身就与王飞跃先生所说的“读过让纳什成名的那篇博弈论文的人都知道，此文就引用了两篇文献，第一篇就是冯•诺伊曼与摩根斯坦合著“的、发表于1944年的《博弈论与经济行为》一书，这是公认的里程碑工作，开启了经济学中博弈论研究。” 观点一致。

       《A Beautiful Mind》的作者Sylvia Nasar还与Harold W. Kuhn教授合作编辑了纳什的著作，名为《The Essential John Nash》 （见附5）。“戏说型”的传记作者一般没有胆量参与主编传主的学术著作吧？

附1：《A Beautiful Mind》再版后记摘录：

A Beautiful Mind_ The Life of Mathematical Genius and Nobel Laureate John Nash-T.pdf

《A Beautiful Mind》中文版下载网址：http://vdisk.weibo.com/s/B0vxDWLGK0zO

附2：http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-111559-893082.html

                                                              《A Beautiful Mind》隐瞒了的真相 精选

附4：http://bbs.sciencenet.cn/thread-49672-1-1.html

                                                [分享]《普林斯顿的幽灵——纳什传》 

       还原一个真实的纳什，《普林斯顿的幽灵——纳什传》，让大家真正了解一个与《美丽心灵》中迥异的天才！

注：《普林斯顿的幽灵——纳什传》直的与《美丽心灵》迥异吗？未必！上传者也许只是看过电影《美丽心灵》而已。

附5：http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i7238.html

(The essential john nash(有译作“约翰.纳什精华”)

When John Nash won the Nobel prize in economics in 1994, many people were surprised to learn that he was alive and well. Since then, Sylvia Nasar's celebrated biography A Beautiful Mind, the basis of a new major motion picture, has revealed the man. The Essential John Nash reveals his work--in his own words. This book presents, for the first time, the full range of Nash's diverse contributions not only to game theory, for which he received the Nobel, but to pure mathematics--from Riemannian geometry and partial differential equations--in which he commands even greater acclaim among academics. Included are nine of Nash's most influential papers, most of them written over the decade beginning in 1949.

                                                            INTRODUCTION
                                                                              SYLVIA NASAR
    When Freeman Dyson, the physicist, greeted John Forbes Nash, Jr. at the Institute for Advanced Study one day in the early 1990s, he hardly expected a response. A mathematics legend in his twenties, Nash had suffered for decades from a devastating mental illness. A mute, ghost-like figure who scrawled mysterious messages on blackboards and occupied himself with numerological calculations, he was known around Princeton only as “the Phantom.” To Dyson’s astonishment, Nash replied. He’d seen Dyson’s daughter, an authority on computers, on the news, he said. “It was beautiful,” recalled Dyson. “Slowly, he just somehow woke up.” Nash’s miraculous emergence from an illness long considered a life sentence was neither the first, nor last, surprise twist in an extraordinary life.
 The eccentric West Virginian with the movie star looks and Olympian manner burst onto the mathematical scene in 1948. A one-line letter of recommendation—“This man is a genius.”—introduced the twenty-year-old to Princeton’s elite math department. A little more than a year later, Nash had written the twenty-seven-page thesis that would one day win him a Nobel.
 Over the next decade, his stunning achievements and flamboyant behavior made Nash a celebrity in the mathematics world. Donald Newman, a mathematician who knew him in the early 1950s, called him “a bad boy, but a great one.” Lloyd Shapley, a fellow graduate student at Princeton, said of Nash, “What redeemed him was a clear, logical, beautiful mind.” Obsessed with originality, disdainful of authority, supremely self-confident, Nash rushed in where more conventional minds refused to tread. “Everyone else would climb a peak by looking for a path somewhere on the mountain,” recalled Newman. “Nash would climb another mountain altogether and from that distant peak would shine a searchlight back on the first peak.” By his thirtieth birthday, Nash seemed to have it all: he was married to a gorgeous young physicist and was about to be promoted to full professor at MIT; Fortune magazine had just named him one of the brightest stars of the younger generation of “new” mathematicians....

       库恩教授为《The Essential John Nash》写的序言：

附6：http://movie.douban.com/subject/5985959/

约翰·纳什：伟大的疯狂 The American Experience: A Brilliant Madness (2002)

导演: Mark Samels
主演: John Nash
类型: 纪录片
制片国家/地区: 美国
语言: 英语
上映日期: 2002-04-28(美国)
片长: 53分钟
又名: The story of Nobel Prize winning mathematician John Nash
IMDb链接: tt0319109