Nobel Prize Laureate

I met John Nash yesterday. He won a Nobel Prize in economics and was the subject of the movie "A Beautiful Mind" several years ago, starring Russell Crowe. More important, I took Dad, who was a colleague of Nash's, first at Princeton, then in their first teaching jobs at Princeton, and next, at MIT. They are game theorists, students of Von Neumann and Oscar Morgenstern. Nash was sweeping the floor at the Institute for Advanced Study for thirty years, incapacitated by mental illness. He remains "out there" today. He also possesses that streak of intellectual arrogance that these types all arm themselves with in academe, or is it just this subset, I am not sure. He read his lecture verbatim from an overhead projector. The 600 or 700 hundred star-watchers had little clue about the subject, money, but it did not matter very much. It reminded me of the time when I went into London to see Noam Chomsky and hear him lecture about semantics. I have no clue about his subject, then or now. It was a scene. Dad seemed to need the break. We picked Sophie up after lacrosse practice and he came back with us to the apartment afterwards, drank a gin and tonic, ate a few pieces of smoked trout, looked at the NYT's crossword, and we went to dinner on Thayer Street. We drove him home, where the dogs, not Mary, greeted him. She was in bed, perhaps asleep, who knows. We let that sleeping dog lie.