A Beautiful Mind

History is often a story of trials and tribulations, with great men who unintentionally change the world. This trend of personalizing history by telling it through the lives and contributions of brilliant individuals continues today. Due to the wide-ranging success of science, mathematics, and technology, a unique emphasis has been placed in recent years on the individual contributions of innovative scientists, mathematical geniuses, and technologist. As a mathematical genius, John Nash is an individual whose life frames many facets of the diverting landscape of 19th century America, individually because he suffered an abrupt fall from grace after he fell victim to paranoid schizophrenia at the peak of his professional career. Through remarkable remission of his sickness and the winning of the 1994 Nobel Prize, Nash was brought back into the public’s eye. Through the book and movie A Beautiful Mind, the reader and viewer was able to see that Nash was a man of incredible historical interest. Both the film and movie were able to show his reality to a general audience.
In many ways the film A Beautiful Mind absolutely misleads the audience of the historical detail in its representation of the life of John Nash. Although he was enrolled as a graduate student at Princeton University, his experience there was considerably different from that shown in the film. In the beginning of the movie, Professor Helinger delivers a motivational speech to the incoming freshman class, asking the students “Now who among you will be the next Morse? The next Einstein? Who among you will be the vanguard of democracy, freedom, and discovery?” This speech sets the tone for Nash at Princeton, making it clear that he is expected to deliver “publishable, applicable results” in order to earn his way to graduate. This is very much the same competitive, cut-throat