A Beautiful Mind: Chapter 16 Summary & Analysis

At the end of June 1951, Nash is living in Boston and working in Cambridge. MIT, where he is employed as an instructor, is the nation’s “leading engineering school,” though it is not yet a renowned research university (as it is now). MIT looks very different from Princeton: the buildings are “utilitarian,” not Gothic, and a number of important military research projects require a large amount of military personnel on campus. Additionally, MIT’s faculty members are less established than the famous professors at Princeton. But MIT is also less exclusionary—for example, it regularly offered admission to Jewish students, who were often snubbed at Princeton.

Nash is somewhat dubious about starting his position at MIT, but as he arrives, the university is beginning to attract top-tier talent, thanks to the work of the mathematics chairman, William Ted Martin. Martin is known for “lur[ing] young hotshot” researchers like Nash to MIT to improve the university’s research focus. The “most attractive” mathematician at MIT to Nash is Norbert Wiener, known as the “father of cybernetics”: like Nash, he is “famously eccentric” and suffers from manic upswings and depressive episodes. Nash and Wiener form a bond, and Nash begins to view Wiener as a “kindred spirit.” Nash also becomes close with Norman Levinson, a prominent MIT professor who, like Al Tucker at Princeton, plays the role of “sounding board and father substitute” to the young mathematician. An early pioneer in the theory of partial differential equations, Levinson, like Nash, is interested in exploring difficult, novel problems.