A Brilliant Madness

A sure to be popular factual complement to Ron Howard's Oscar-winning bio-pic A Beautiful Mind, Mark Samels' A Brilliant Madness, which aired on PBS as part of the acclaimed American Experience series, traces the incredible story of John Forbes Nash, the brilliant mathematician who, in 1958, suffered a mental breakdown at the age of 30 (the same year that Fortune magazine singled him out as one of contemporary mathematics' brightest stars). After a lecture at MIT, in which Professor Nash announced that he was on the cover of Life magazine disguised as the pope (one of many bits of odd behavior), he found himself in and out of mental institutions over the course of the next decade. Diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic, Nash not only claimed that aliens were contacting him, but also became obsessive about finding secret patterns in numbers; fevered fantasies that took their toll on his wife Alicia, who eventually filed for divorce (they were remarried in 2001). Remarkably, using his gifted "beautiful mind," Nash fought his illness, entering semi-remission in the 1980s, and accepting a Nobel Prize in 1994 for his complex work on game theory decades before. Narrated by Liev Schreiber, the documentary combines interviews with Nash, Alicia, his sister Martha Nash Legg, Sylvia Nasar (author of A Beautiful Mind), various mathematical colleagues, and mental health experts, together with archival footage and creative filming (to help visually suggest the disorientation of madness). Offering a truer picture of Nash's story, as well as some fascinating insights into the close-knit mathematical community, this is definitely recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)