My
beginning as a legally recognized individual occurred on June 13, 1928
in Bluefield, West Virginia, in the Bluefield Sanitarium, a hospital
that no longer exists. Of course I can't consciously remember anything
from the first two or three years of my life after birth. (And, also,
one suspects, psychologically, that the earliest memories have become
"memories of memories" and are comparable to traditional folk tales
passed on by tellers and listeners from generation to generation.) But
facts are available when direct memory fails for many circumstances.
My
father, for whom I was named, was an electrical engineer and had come
to Bluefield to work for the electrical utility company there which
was and is the Appalachian Electric Power Company. He was a veteran of
WW1 and had served in France as a lieutenant in the supply services
and consequently had not been in actual front lines combat in the war.
He was originally from Texas and had obtained his B. S. degree in
electrical engineering from Texas Agricultural and Mechanical (Texas
A. and M.).
My mother, originally Margaret Virginia Martin, but called Virginia,
was herself also born in Bluefield. She had studied at West Virginia
University and was a school teacher before her marriage, teaching
English and sometimes Latin. But my mother's later life was
considerably affected by a partial loss of hearing resulting from a
scarlet fever infection that came at the time when she was a student
at
WVU.
Her parents had come as a couple to Bluefield from their original
homes in western North Carolina. Her father, Dr. James Everett Martin,
had prepared as a physician at the University of Maryland in Baltimore
and came to Bluefield, which was then expanding rapidly in population,
to start up his practice. But in his later years Dr. Martin became
more of a real estate investor and left actual medical practice. I
never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born but I
have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the
piano at the old house which was located rather centrally in
Bluefield.
A sister, Martha, was born about two and a half years later than me on
November 16, 1930.
I went to the standard schools in Bluefield but also to a kindergarten
before starting in the elementary school level. And my parents
provided an encyclopedia, Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia, that I
learned a lot from by reading it as a child. And also there were other
books available from either our house or the house of the grandparents
that were of educational value.
Bluefield, a small city in a comparatively remote geographical
location in the Appalachians, was not a community of scholars or of
high technology. It was a center of businessmen, lawyers, etc. that
owed its existence to the railroad and the rich nearby coal fields of
West Virginia and western Virginia. So, from the intellectual
viewpoint, it offered the sort of challenge that one had to learn from
the world's knowledge rather than from the knowledge of the immediate
community.
By the time I was a student in high school I was reading the classic
"Men of Mathematics" by E. T. Bell and I remember succeeding in
proving the classic Fermat theorem about an integer multiplied by
itself p times where p is a prime.
I also did electrical and chemistry experiments at that time. At
first, when asked in school to prepare an essay about my career, I
prepared one about a career as an electrical engineer like my father.
Later, when I actually entered Carnegie Tech. in Pittsburgh I entered
as a student with the major of chemical engineering.
Regarding the circumstances of my studies at Carnegie (now
Carnegie Mellon U.), I was lucky to be there on a full
scholarship, called the George Westinghouse Scholarship. But after one
semester as a chem. eng. student I reacted negatively to the
regimentation of courses such as mechanical drawing and shifted to
chemistry instead. But again, after continuing in chemistry for a
while I encountered difficulties with quantitative analysis where it
was not a matter of how well one could think and understand or learn
facts but of how well one could handle a pipette and perform a
titration in the laboratory. Also the mathematics faculty were
encouraging me to shift into mathematics as my major and explaining to
me that it was not almost impossible to make a good career in America
as a mathematician. So I shifted again and became officially a student
of mathematics. And in the end I had learned and progressed so much in
mathematics that they gave me an M. S. in addition to my B. S. when I
graduated.
I should mention that during my last year in the Bluefield schools
that my parents had arranged for me to take supplementary math.
courses at Bluefield College, which was then a 2-year institution
operated by Southern Baptists. I didn't get official advanced standing
at Carnegie because of my extra studies but I had advanced knowledge
and ability and didn't need to learn much from the first math. courses
at Carnegie.
When I graduated I remember that I had been offered fellowships to
enter as a graduate student at either
Harvard or
Princeton. But the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous
since I had not actually won the Putnam competition and also Princeton
seemed more interested in getting me to come there. Prof. A. W. Tucker
wrote a letter to me encouraging me to come to Princeton and from the
family point of view it seemed attractive that geographically
Princeton was much nearer to Bluefield. Thus Princeton became the
choice for my graduate study location.
But while I was still at Carnegie I took one elective course in
"International Economics" and as a result of that exposure to economic
ideas and problems, arrived at the idea that led to the paper "The
Bargaining Problem" which was later published in Econometrical. And it
was this idea which in turn, when I was a graduate student at
Princeton, led to my interest in the game theory studies there which
had been stimulated by the work of von Neumann and Morgenstern.
As a graduate student I studied mathematics fairly broadly and I was
fortunate enough, besides developing the idea which led to
"Non-Cooperative Games", also to make a nice discovery relating to
manifolds and real algebraic varieties. So I was prepared actually for
the possibility that the game theory work would not be regarded as
acceptable as a thesis in the mathematics department and then that I
could realize the objective of a Ph. D. thesis with the other results.
But in the event the game theory ideas, which deviated somewhat from
the "line" (as if of "political party lines") of von Neumann and
Morgenstern's book, were accepted as a thesis for a mathematics Ph. D.
and it was later, while I was an instructor at
M.I.T., that I wrote up Real Algebraic Manifolds and sent
it in for publication.
I went to M.I.T. in the summer of 1951 as a "C.L.E. Moore Instructor".
I had been an instructor at Princeton for one year after obtaining my
degree in 1950. It seemed desirable more for personal and social
reasons than academic ones to accept the higher-paying instructorship
at M.I.T.
I was on the mathematics faculty at M.I.T. from 1951 through until I
resigned in the spring of 1959. During academic 1956 - 1957 I had an
Alfred P. Sloan grant and chose to spend the year as a (temporary)
member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
During this period of time I managed to solve a classical unsolved
problem relating to differential geometry which was also of some
interest in relation to the geometric questions arising in general
relativity. This was the problem to prove the isometric embeddability
of abstract Riemannian manifolds in flat (or "Euclidean") spaces. But
this problem, although classical, was not much talked about as an
outstanding problem. It was not like, for example, the 4-color
conjecture.
So as it happened, as soon as I heard in conversation at M.I.T. about
the question of the embeddability being open I began to study it. The
first break led to a curious result about the embeddability being
realizable in surprisingly low-dimensional ambient spaces provided
that one would accept that the embedding would have only limited
smoothness. And later, with "heavy analysis", the problem was solved
in terms of embeddings with a more proper degree of smoothness.
While I was on my "Sloan sabbatical" at the IAS in Princeton I studied
another problem involving partial differential equations which I had
learned of as a problem that was unsolved beyond the case of 2
dimensions. Here, although I did succeed in solving the problem, I ran
into some bad luck since, without my being sufficiently informed on
what other people were doing in the area, it happened that I was
working in parallel with Ennio de Giorgi of Pisa, Italy. And de Giorgi
was first actually to achieve the ascent of the summit (of the
figuratively described problem) at least for the particularly
interesting case of "elliptic equations".
It seems conceivable that if either de Giorgi or Nash had failed in
the attack on this problem (of a priori estimates of Holder
continuity) then that the lone climber reaching the peak would have
been recognized with mathematics' Fields medal (which has
traditionally been restricted to persons less than 40 years old).
Now I must arrive at the time of my change from scientific rationality
of thinking into the delusional thinking characteristic of persons who
are psychiatrically diagnosed as "schizophrenic" or "paranoid
schizophrenic". But I will not really attempt to describe this long
period of time but rather avoid embarrassment by simply omitting to
give the details of truly personal type.
While I was on the academic sabbatical of 1956 - 1957 I also entered
into marriage. Alicia had graduated as a physics major from M.I.T.
where we had met and she had a job in the New York City area in 1956 -
1957. She had been born in El Salvador but came at an early age to the
U.S. and she and her parents had long been U.S. citizens, her father
being an M. D. and ultimately employed at a hospital operated by the
federal government in Maryland.
The mental disturbances originated in the early months of 1959 at a
time when Alicia happened to be pregnant. And as a consequence I
resigned my position as a faculty member at M.I.T. and, ultimately,
after spending 50 days under "observation" at the McLean Hospital,
travelled to Europe and attempted to gain status there as a refugee.
I later spent times of the order of five to eight months in hospitals
in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis and always attempting a
legal argument for release.
And it did happen that when I had been long enough hospitalized that I
would finally renounce my delusional hypotheses and revert to thinking
of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to
mathematical research. In these interludes of, as it were, enforced
rationality, I did succeed in doing some respectable mathematical
research. Thus there came about the research for "Le Probleme de
Cauchy pour les E'quations Differentielles d'un Fluide Generale"; the
idea that Prof. Hironaka called "the Nash blowing-up transformation";
and those of "Arc Structure of Singularities" and "Analyticity of
Solutions of Implicit Function Problems with Analytic Data".
But after my return to the dream-like delusional hypotheses in the
later 60's I became a person of delusionally influenced thinking but
of relatively moderate behavior and thus tended to avoid
hospitalization and the direct attention of psychiatrists.
Thus further time passed. Then gradually I began to intellectually
reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had
been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably,
with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a
hopeless waste of intellectual effort.
So at the present time I seem to be thinking rationally again in the
style that is characteristic of scientists. However this is not
entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical
disability to good physical health. One aspect of this is that
rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his
relation to the cosmos. For example, a non-Zoroastrian could think of
Zarathustra as simply a madman who led millions of naive followers to
adopt a cult of ritual fire worship. But without his "madness"
Zarathustra would necessarily have been only another of the millions
or billions of human individuals who have lived and then been
forgotten.
Statistically, it would seem improbable that any mathematician or
scientist, at the age of 66, would be able through continued research
efforts, to add much to his or her previous achievements. However I am
still making the effort and it is conceivable that with the gap period
of about 25 years of partially deluded thinking providing a sort of
vacation my situation may be atypical. Thus I have hopes of being able
to achieve something of value through my current studies or with any
new ideas that come in the future.
From
Les Prix Nobel
1994.
April.22nd.2002
http://sufizmveinsan.com
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