A Beautiful Mind  美丽心灵

Hero: Russell Crowe

In the absorbing film equation(a statement in mathematics) "A Beautiful Mind," the hero and main variable is a mathematician -- too variable for his own good. And Russell Crowe, last year's Oscar-winning best actor in "Gladiator," may be headed toward another.

John Nash Jr., the real-life figure Crowe renders this time, is an eccentric (someone who often behaves in slightly strange or unusual ways) genius who shows up at Princeton's brutally competitive math department in 1947 with no prep-school(in the U.S., a private school for children over the age of 11 that prepares them for college) pedigree(the parents and other past family members of a person), money or manners -- just chips on both shoulders. He was born with two helpings of brains but only half a helping of heart: "I don't like people much, and they don't like me."

His only "real" friend and confidant is roommate Charles. Otherwise, Nash is abrasive( behaving in way that seems rude to other people) to professors and fellow students alike and cares obsessively about only one thing -- "finding a truly original idea."

Indeed he does so, early on, in Game Theory -- his brilliant analysis of situational strategies in which the outcome of one's choice of action hinges on the actions of others. Nash's mathematics of competition had applications to business, war and biologyand boldly contradicted the long-accepted economic doctrines of Adam Smith. But Nash himself would not be able to refine and develop it.

Moving from Princeton to MIT at the peak of the Cold War, Nash is recruited by a shadowy Defense Department operative for top-secret work as a code-breaker -- and becomes increasingly consumed and frightened thereby. He is forbidden to confide even in his wonderful student-turned-wife Alicia. The secrecy and danger mount. So do his insanely complex cryptological formulas. He gets weirder and weirder by the day, and finally lost in delusions -- his genius undermined by paranoid (suffering from the mental illness) schizophrenia.

It's a disease thought to be incurable as well as degenerative in the 1950s, but he decides to fight it. Victory won't come for 30 years -- in the form of the 1994 Nobel Prize.

It was the other way around for John Nash: The fickle finger of fate nearly ruined his life, but not his math.

Recommendation: Nash used his way to prove the truth and the power of self-control. I suggest we pay our honor to the great Noble Price owner.