A Beautiful Mind

A Beautiful Mind (1998) is an unauthorized biography of Nobel Prize-winning economist and mathematician John Nash by Sylvia Nasar, professor of journalism at Columbia University. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1998 and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in biography. The book was adapted into the film by the same name in 2001 directed by Ron Howard and starring Russell Crowe as Nash. Scope Starting with his childhood, the book covers Nash's years at Princeton and MIT, his work for the RAND Corporation, his family and his struggle with schizophrenia. Although Nasar notes that Nash did not consider himself a homosexual, she describes his arrest for indecent exposure and firing from RAND amid the suspicion that he was; at the time, it was considered grounds for revoking one's security clearance.