Bittersweet Honors

The myth is simple and satisfying: genius labors long and hard, achieves brilliant success, wins Nobel Prize, basks in glory. But prizewinners' stories are rarely so straightforward. This year's controversial Peace Prize, for example, which was shared by Yasser Arafat, Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, has triggered as much controversy as celebration. And for some of the other laureates, there are, behind the Nobel Committee's glowing citations, tales of recognition too long deferred, of promise lost, of pain and tragedy.

ECONOMICS

Often the winner of a Nobel Prize is an obscure academic, noticed by few in his community until he is thrust into the spotlight. But when photographs of John Nash appeared in the press last week, a common reaction in and around Princeton, New Jersey, was a shock of recognition: "Oh, my gosh, it's him!" Nash, who shared the Economics Prize with John Harsanyi of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and Reinhard Selten of the University of Bonn, is a familiar eccentric in the university town -- a quiet, detached man who frequently spends his time riding the local "Dinky" train on its short hop between Princeton and Princeton Junction, reading newspapers discarded by other passengers. Some knew him as the author of the enormously complicated mathematical equations that appeared on classroom blackboards from time to time -- the product of a splendid but troubled mind working out his thoughts when no one was around.

The work that earned Nash his prize was largely completed by 1950 when, at ^ age 22, he submitted the Princeton Ph.D. thesis that has been described as the rock on which the mathematics of game theory is based. Game theory tries to explain economic behavior by analyzing the strategies "players" in the marketplace use to maximize their winnings. Nash, drawing on the dynamics of such games as poker and chess, introduced the distinction between cooperative games, in which players form binding agreements, and noncooperative ones, in which they don't. His "Nash Equilibrium" has been used by generations of corporate and military strategists to help decide when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em.

Nash taught in the '50s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but his career there was reportedly interrupted by bouts of mental illness. He returned to Princeton, where he became increasingly withdrawn. Eventually, the mathematics department appointed him a "visiting research collaborator," a post that has allowed the man a university press officer describes as "incredibly brilliant and eccentric" to roam his beloved campus freely for the past 25 years, using its computers whenever he likes, and occasionally its blackboards.

MEDICINE