ABSTRACT
The winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture in 2001 was Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind. Drawn from journalist Sylvia Nasar's book of the same title, it tells the life story of John Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning mathematician and economist who throughout his life suffered from bouts of mental illness. The film, like the more recent The Imitation Game about the tragic life of mathematician Alan Turing, traffics in very old cliches of what genius is. The genius is a Luftmensch tethered to the world of mere mortals by the thinnest of wires. Like the souls in Plato's Phaedrus, he is drawn up to the ideas but eventually reaches his limit, and when he crashes back into the corporeal world, he and those around him get wounded. But at the peak of his journey he captures a glimpse of the ineffable.
