Issue 23, Fall 2002

William A. McEachern, Editor

A Not-To-Do List

In the Spring 2002 issue of The Teaching Economist, I discussed how the movie A Beautiful Mind downplayed the influence of books and teachers on John Nash's education, at least when compared to evidence offered in the award-winning biography of the same title by Silvia Nasar (Simon & Schuster, 1998). I didn't say much about Nash's teaching because the movie had only one scene on that. But the biography offers plenty, and it reads like a not-to-do-list for teachers.

According to Nasar, Nash's teaching duties at MIT were relatively light, but he found them annoying nonetheless. In his seven years there, he minimized his preparation time by avoiding advanced courses and teaching mostly undergraduate calculus (p. 139). Because he disliked step-by-step exposition, his lectures were largely free association (p. 156). Can you imagine learning calculus that way? According to a former student, Nash "didn't care whether the students learned or not, made outrageous demands and talked about subjects that were either irrelevant or far too advanced" (p. 140).

Nash would put classic unsolved math problems on exams, such as the equivalent of Fermat's Last Theorem (p. 140), and at least one midterm was given unannounced (p. 240). He asked his students to devise ways to grade each other's work so that he wouldn't be bothered (p. 235). Better-informed students began avoiding his courses. For example, between the first and second semesters of a yearlong calculus course, enrollment dropped from about thirty students to only five (p. 140).

Nasar writes that Nash didn't like being challenged in or outside of class, and would dismiss anyone who asked him to prove an assertion (p. 146). But he and an MIT colleague "delighted in ganging up on graduate students struggling with a dissertation, dissecting a problem that some poor guy had been working on for two years and springing their own solution on him" (p. 237). At the same time, Nash could be patient with students he regarded as mathematically gifted (p. 141).

For one final take on A Beautiful Mind, see the second entry of The Grapevine.

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