A Beautiful Blogger: Startling Elegance
Faithful d.* readers know that one our bloggers here has mentioned, upon occasion, that he assisted John Nash. Still, I was compelled to slap my husband and exclaim last night while I reading in bed, when on page 350 of Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind, I stumbled across the following passage. The feeling was something like bumping into a celebrity at a restaurant (right, well I've never actually done that, unless you count the local sportscaster or weatherman) but I can imagine.
"Edward G. Nilges, a programmer who worked in Princeton University's computer center from 1987 to 1992, recalled that Nash 'acted frightened and silent' at first. In Nilges's last year or two at Princeton, however, Nash was asking him questions about the Internet and about programs he was working on. Nilges was impressed: 'Nash's computer programs were startlingly elegant.'"
Now I'm interested in reading some of Rebecca Goldstein's books such as Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel, Mind-Body Problem and maybe Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave us Modernity that is due out next week (5/30/2006).
Cool, Donna!
Glad you're reading A Beautiful Mind. I've read The Mind Body Problem and I recommend it highly.
The Mind Body Problem was written before Nash was known to be == Nash, and it mentions him as "the Phantom of Fine Hall".
I have always tried to keep my Nash contacts to scale, although I confess that at the time the movie came out I hoped it would help me meet girls :-). In a sense, during the most critical contact I was a Help Desk type of person, who happened to know his job. The usual sort of Help desk person would have caused Nash to have a relapse. Hell, they drive "normal" people crazy.
For example, I downloaded and paid for Sun's version of Office Star, but had to interrupt; the Web site said I could. But when I returned to continue the order was listed as complete, I could not download, and had been billed 65.00.
I totally lost it and sent a letter in all caps to the Sun help site. They pretended to listen...and directed me to a site which also listed the order as complete, and had no download button.
I then sent a demand in all caps for a full refund, including some interesting remarks about how Sun is perverting Open Source.
I went to the Open Office .ORG site, downloaded without a hitch and now I'm running a semiclone of Microsoft office with additional coolness. I plan, time permitting, to participate in development or technical writing at open office.
One of the frontline student Help desk employees at Princeton could have helped Nash were it not for the fact that he sort of knew me and had trouble with strangers. At other times he did get Help of various kinds. But owing to my odd hours I had a little more contact with him, which is why my former boss referred me as a source.
No current information centers employee who'd worked with Nash was, I believe, willing to source, since after I left Princeton, its centralized information center was downsized and downgraded; high-powered academics vastly prefer departmental and distributed computing, and the day is long past when they'd tramp to the "computer center" to "submit" work in the sado-masochism of the mainframe.
The other employees were afraid (perhaps) that they'd "step on toes", but my former boss knew (1) I like to shoot my mouth off and (2) I needed some third-party confirmation of my professional skills because at the time I was doing consulting in Chicago.