Nash did not think of himself as a homosexual.
No other quote in the book may come as a greater dose of cold water throw roughly into the face of the reader who comes to this book already having seen then film adaptation than this one. Nowhere in the film is there the slightest hint that John Nash is anything but distinctly heterosexual. (Admittedly, casting Jennifer Connelly as his wife doesn’t contribute very strongly to raising suspicion.) This entire aspect of the biography—the potentiality of Nash being at least possibly a latent homosexual—was dropped from inclusion in the film adaptation. Which was almost certainly one of the wisest decisions made by the filmmakers. The reason that Nash did not consider himself to be gay is that, according to Nash and pretty much everyone else who knew him, he wasn’t. The pursuit of this issue is one of the reasons for the book’s reputation for being controversial in some quarters.
“I got the impression that other people at MIT were wearing red neckties so I would notice them. As I became more and more delusional, not only persons at MIT but people in Boston wearing red neckties [would seem significant to me]. Also, [there was some relation to] a crypto-communist party.”
It is interesting how the genius of Nash is entirely consistent with his descent into the madness of schizophrenia. What Nash is describing here is a nutshell version of how his life began to submit to paranoia. The “men in red neckties” are Nash’s own personalized version of “men in black.” Both represent shadowy authoritarian representatives of overreaching government indulging in conspiracy theories and the construction of convenient domestic villains. The reference to the association with communists is key: this behavior occurred in the 1950’s, a period of time rooted in the irrational fear by western governments that communist influence was infiltrating all aspects of society, especially entertainment and academia.
Nash became aware of a new branch of mathematics that was in the air of Fine Hall. It was an attempt, invented by von Neumann in the 1920s, to construct a systematic theory of rational human behavior by focusing on games as simple settings for the exercise of human rationality.
It is an understated introduction to a new chapter. The chapter it titled “The Theory of Games” and what the narrator is speaking about here is the niche in economic mathematics where Nash occupies a seat at the most exclusive of tables: those who win prizes handed in out Stockholm in the name of a fellow named Alfred Nobel. The systemic theory of behavior which is referenced in the quote above is much more well known today than it was when Nash was becoming aware of it. In fact, it is a branch of economy theory that modern society is perhaps more steeped in than anything outside the broader conventions of supply and demand. Game theory is quite literally invested in probably every aspect of modern living one can think of and Nash’s contribution would go on to form an elemental aspect of that omnipresence. It is famously known today as the Nash equilibrium.
