John Forbes Nash, Jr. Quotes
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It has had a tremendous impact on my life, more than on the life of most Prize winners, because I was in an unusual situation. I was unemployed at the time. I was in good health, but I had reached the age of 66 and beginning to get social security, but I didn't have much of that. I had many years of unemployment before me.
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I think mental illness or madness can be an escape also. People don't develop a mental illness because they are in the happiest of situations, usually. One doctor observed that it was rare when people were rich to become schizophrenic. If they were poor or didn't have too much money, then it was more likely.
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If things are not so good, you may be one to imagine something better. For me, I was able to imagine myself as in a role of greater importance than I would seem to be ordinarily.
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To some extent, people who are insane are nonconformists, and society and their family wish they would live what appear to be useful lives.
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I later spent... five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis, and always attempting a legal argument for release.
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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.
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I did have strange ideas during certain periods of time.
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I can see there's a connection between not following normal thinking and doing creative thinking. I wouldn't have had good scientific ideas if I had thought more normally.
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The dollar used to be a gold standard currency. And the dollar is really good in the last century, I mean in the 19th century.
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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.
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The ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.
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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.
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I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium, and symptoms of schizophrenia.
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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.
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People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better.
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I can observe the game theory is applied very much in economics. Generally, it would be wise to get into the mathematics as much as seems reasonable because the economists who use more mathematics are somehow more respected than those who use less. That's the trend.
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Though I had success in my research both when I was mad and when I was not, eventually I felt that my work would be better respected if I thought and acted like a 'normal' person.
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In madness, I thought I was the most important person in the world.
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It is easy to say that there are the rich and the poor, and so something should be done. But in history, there are always the rich and the poor. If the poor were not as poor, we would still call them the poor. I mean, whoever has less can be called the poor. You will always have the 10% that have less and the 10% that have the most.
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In a dream it's typical not to be rational.
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I know that if I could really understand mental illness, then it would be appropriate to make a big career shift. I would become a therapist and a leader in terms of mental illness. But I'm not in the position.
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You could see how money is different all of a sudden in Italy when they had the lire and now they have the euro. So they, in a revolutionary way, have gone from bad money to good money comparatively. But what about the rest of the world?
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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.
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There are things that tend to moderate with age. Schizophrenia is somewhat like that.