A Beautiful Mind: Chapter 31 Summary & Analysis

Back at MIT in the fall of 1957, Nash and Alicia find an apartment in Cambridge, and Alicia gets a job nearby as a physics researcher. They often go out to dinner with Nash’s old graduate student friends, since Alicia wants to make sure that she and her new husband are surrounded by “amusing people.” Nash continues to work on the turbulence problem he had begun at the Courant Institute, addressing small gaps in the proof: it will take most of the year for him to be able to submit his research to a journal.

Overall, Nash’s 30th year is “looking very bright.” In addition to his academic achievements, Fortune magazine is going to feature him in an upcoming series on the leaders of “New Math.” Yet Nash is also highly dissatisfied with the state of his life, since he is not yet a full, tenured professor at MIT: his candidacy is controversial, since many MIT professors, like some professors at Princeton, feel that he is a “poor teacher and an even worse colleague.”

In 1958, the Fields Medal—“the ultimate distinction that a mathematician can be granted by his peers,” awarded to a mathematician under forty—is awarded to two mathematicians, a topologist and a number theorist, after an “unusually contentious” round of deliberations. Though Nash’s name was up for consideration, he likely did not make the final rounds: no one could have predicted, though, that this would be Nash’s final chance to win the prize. Nash had hoped that by putting one of his papers up for the Bocher Prize, another prestigious American math prize, he might increase his chances of winning the Fields—to no avail.