A Beautiful Mind

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1998

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Part 1, Chapters 11-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 11 Summary: “Lloyd, Princeton, 1950”

In 1950, Nash is still largely unpopular with his peers. Most of his interactions with other young men appear to be “motivated by an aggressive competitiveness and the most cold considerations of self-interest” (99). This leads many to assume that he is perfectly content existing in an “arid state of emotional isolation” (99). In fact, however, although he is clumsy in his approach, Nash does want “to be close to someone” (99).

When Nash befriends an older student named Lloyd Shapley, it is “the first of a series of emotional attachments Nash form[s] to other men” (99). Shapley is a brilliant mathematician and an emerging star of game theory who works at the RAND Corporation using “game theory applications to solve military problems (100).

Nash and Shapley share a mutual appreciation of each other’s brilliant minds although Nash largely expresses this by acting “like a thirteen-year-old having his first crush” (101). He bothers the older man constantly, leaving him notes and playing “all kinds of pranks on him” (101).

Nash also targets Shapley’s friends with pranks, some of which get “totally out of hand” (101). Often these seem to express jealousy about Shapley having other friends. Shapley largely responds with “amused tolerance” (102) although, one day, he does suggest that Nash “channel his mischievous impulses in a more intellectually constructive way” (102).

The result of this redirection of Nash’s energies is another game, which Nash titles “Fuck Your Buddy” (102). The rules of the game “force players to join forces with one another to advance but ultimately to double-cross one another in order to win” (102). During one game, Shapley’s friend John McCarthy is outraged when Nash double-crosses him on the penultimate round. Nash, however, keeps simply saying, “But I didn’t need you anymore” (102).

Nash’s friendship with Shapley “always had a competitive edge” (102) and, as this increases and Nash’s independence and self-serving actions begin to irritate Shapley, they fall out. Fifty years later, Shapley will deny that they “had ever been close friends” (103).

Chapter 12 Summary: “The War of Wits, RAND, Summer 1950”

In the summer of 1950, Nash begins working at the RAND Corporation. RAND is the “original think tank” (105), funded by the Air Force but given “an amazingly free hand” (106) with how it spends the money as long as its research remains broadly within its general mission statement.

This mission is “to apply rational analysis and the latest quantitative methods to the problem of how to use the terrifying new nuclear weaponry to forestall war with Russia – or to win a war if deterrence fail[s]” (105). Game theory is a major aspect of this and, in fact, it is through RAND’s research in this area “that game theory in particular and mathematical modeling in general [enter] the mainstream of postwar thinking in economics” (107).

In many respects, RAND matches and reinforces Nash’s view of the world thanks to its “worship of the rational life and quantification” and its combination of “detachment, paranoia, and megalomania” (104). Like him, Nash’s colleagues are “committed to the idea that systematic thought and quantification were the key to the most complex problems” (109), up to and including the question of how to avoid nuclear war with Russia.

Despite growing Cold War paranoia, RAND is surprisingly informal. Situated “in a once sleepy beach colony” near Los Angeles, some of the think tank’s “best work [is] done in beach chairs” (108). There is no need for formal dress and staff members routinely play practical jokes on one another. The mathematicians, in particular, work how they please, with “no set hours,” sometimes coming “into their offices at 3 a.m.” (111).

This lack of strict regimentation and routine suits Nash well. He again follows his own idiosyncratic approach to work, “glid[ing] through the corridors for hours at a time, frowning, lost in thought, his shirt untucked” (113). He is “usually chewing an empty paper coffee cup” (113) as he wanders the building.

Despite this neat fit, Nash almost immediately begins “actively disengaging himself from the interests and individuals that brought him to RAND in the first place, retreating from game theory and moving rapidly into pure mathematics” (105). Again, Nash is unpopular with many of his colleagues who find him “absurdly childish” (114), finding his love of “playing adolescent jokes” (114) and his absent-minded whistling deeply frustrating.

Chapter 13 Summary: “Game Theory at RAND”

Before Nash even starts at RAND, his work on game theory has captured the think tank’s attention. Prior to this, RAND had mainly worked with von Neumann’s interpretation of zero-sum games with two players, believing that such games of “total conflict” (115) matched the problem of “nuclear conflict between two superpowers” (115).

However, nuclear weapons can inflict damage on such a vast scale that the consequences of a strike can be so far reaching that even the attacker is negatively affected. As a result, even war is no longer a situation “in which opponents have no common interest whatever” (115). As nuclear conflict is no longer a zero-sum game, theorists need to “focus on games that allowed for cooperation as well as conflict” (116).

Of course, in a conflict situation, sides do not willingly cooperate as each is still pursuing its own ends, and this is where Nash’s theory becomes relevant, providing “a framework for asking the right questions” by “demonstrating that noncooperative games, games that did not involve joint actions, had stable solutions” (118).

The Nash equilibrium also inspires the famous experiment the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which is invented at RAND a few months before Nash’s arrival and explores whether individuals are most likely to seek personal gain at the expense of another player or if they will instead “split the difference” (119) and cooperate for lesser but mutual gain. Although Nash’s theory predicts that people will usually pursue their own gain, RAND’s experiments find that players are actually more likely to cooperate.

When Nash starts working at RAND, he devises a model for explaining how people establishing a bargain use threats to ensure that they get what they want from the deal. In doing so, he demonstrates that “each player [has] an ‘optimal’ threat, that is a threat that ensures that a deal is struck no matter what strategy the other player chooses” (120).

By the mid-1950s, interest in game theory has waned at RAND after it concludes that it does not actually reveal a great deal about many of the real-life scenarios to which it is applied, especially military conflicts.

Chapters 11-13 Analysis

Although Nash is, in many respects, a self-interested loner, he still desires relationships with others even if he is not adept at approaching them in a mature way. It is not known whether Nash was sexually attracted to Shapley but he certainly behaves in the awkward manner of a teenager with “his first crush” (101).

A key expression of this is, once again, playing pranks, which sometimes get “totally out of hand” (101), again reflecting Nash’s arrogant disregard for others as well as, on this occasion, revealing his jealousy over Shapley. When Shapley encourages Nash to redirect this behavior into something more constructive, the resulting game, “Fuck Your Buddy” (102), is another expression of Nash’s self-interest and isolation, requiring players to betray their allies in order to win the game. Eventually, it is these self-serving attitudes and Nash’s competitive individualism that drive him and Shapley apart.

Nash’s individualistic approach to games and game theory is more warmly welcomed at RAND. In particular, the fact that his theory moves beyond earlier work’s limited focus on situations of “total conflict” (115) is celebrated for its apparent relevance to nuclear stalemates between superpowers.

Again, this theory applies to situations in which two players must utilize strategies and threats in order to achieve the maximum personal gain from a situation, something he also explores in his development of theory on how players in a bargaining situation have an “‘optimal’ threat” (120) they can use to secure their own benefits. The testing of Nash’s theory in the Prisoner’s Dilemma experiments interestingly reveals that, contrary to Nash’s view of people as isolated and self-serving, most people actually prefer to cooperate and “split the difference” (119).

It is not only the popularity of his work on game theory that makes RAND appear to be a good fit for Nash. The think tank is filled with people who share similar viewpoints, reinforcing Nash’s obsession with “the rational life” (104) and furthering his belief that all things can be reduced to mathematical problems to be solved. It also lacks any strict regimentation, allowing him to pursue original thinking in his usual distracted, self-absorbed manner.

Once again, Nasar presents Nash as “lost in thought” (113), wandering around in his own world, isolated from everyone else. In this instance, she also returns to the motif of physical appearance, observing that he has “his shirt untucked” (113), a minor transgression that nonetheless reflects Nash’s disinterest in appearing “proper,” despite his father’s attempts to drum this into him as a child.

This isolated, distracted, and distant behavior, along with Nash once again indulging in “absurdly childish” (114) activities and pranks, lead to him being unpopular with another group of colleagues, alienating him further from those around him.