Review: A beautiful mind.

As always, got to catch up with ‘a beautiful mind’ pretty late. As the curtains downed, couldn’t help crying! Not only for the mathematician that John Nash was but also for his award speech on receiving the Nobel prize for Mathematics in 1994, at Stockholm, Sweden, where he says, ‘what is logic, what is the reason. what is imaginary, what is rational, what is delusional? you are all that is real and today i am here because of you’ (not in exact words) to his wife who believes in him completely as he fights schizophrenia through his research and teaching years in Princeton. What fine picture. I just checked wiki. The director-scriptwriter must have taken some artistic liberties to bend the story a bit, but still this is fine. Basically being a math grad, my interest in the subject is natural although today after decades i cannot recount anything other than Pythagoras theorem from school days. Married to an engineer who also did his basic degree in math, it is a grand coincidence that now our only son is married into a family of mathematicians as well! Math was very much on my mind for years as I gave away also math tuitions at home for higher secondary girls and under grads in their first and second years who majored in math. I guess, the long retention of math in my mind is primarily due to this reason. I revised my school and univ syllabus everyday with my girls after my office hours! Differential equations could be the most interesting part of calculus in my memory, correct me if I am wrong! Game theory – we did have a paper in Econometrics (that was my masters). Although I cannot recall much, I can say what in math excited me the most. I approached my final year in undergrad with trepidation, because I knew all my five papers were abstract. The toughest Real analysis became a cakewalk once you decoded it. Yah got a centum in that paper as well as in Complex analysis. Remember how in those days some friends used to ask, how could math ever be like that! Countless theorems in abstract running to pages that needed to be proven! I don’t have that scientific temper now but I did once upon a time. So I guess I can understand the preoccupation of a math wizard with numbers and theorems better. Science and math are real. However and whatever others may ridicule about the math/science people, they continue to stay real, unaffected. There is this goodness about academics that is pure and precious. The value is absolute and not exaggerated or faked. ‘A beautiful mind’ is all about this authenticity in my opinion. John Nash played by Russel Crowe comes across as a decent human being, supported in every step by his dedicated wife Alicia (played by Jennifer Connelly). Extraordinarily intelligent men with highest IQ do exhibit some freakish traits as they say, the variance between genius and autism is a very miniscule percentage. I have come across kids under autism spectrum display high level of mathematical understanding. Its really a case of cat on the wall. Its the luck of the parents in my opinion. Inspiring watch. Wonderfully enacted by Russel Crowe. A couple of my friends kids (from India) are/were into Princeton/Harvard. Very proud of my friends who made it possible for their children to reach onto here. Family is the pillar of strength.