研究生英语提高级 A Beautiful Mind课文翻译

A Beautiful Mind

Sylvia Nasar

[1]

John Forbes Nash, Jr.

—

mathematical genius, inventor of a theory of rational

behavior,

visionary

of the thinking machine

—

had been sitting with his visitor, also a

mathematician, for nearly half an hour. It was late on a weekday afternoon in the spring of 1959,

and, though it was only May, uncomfortably warm. Nash was

slumped

in an armchair in one

corner of the hospital lounge, carelessly dressed in a nylon shirt that hung limply over his unbelted

trousers. His powerful frame was slack as a

rag doll

's, his finely molded features expressionless.

He had been staring dully at a spot immediately in front of the left foot

of

Harvard

professor

George Mackey

, hardly moving except to brush his long dark hair away

from his forehead in a

fitful

, repetitive motion. His visitor sat upright, oppressed by the silence,

acutely conscious that the doors to the room were locked. Mackey finally could contain himself no

longer. His voice was slightly

querulous

, but he strained to be gentle.

Mackey,

you believe that

extraterrestrials

are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are

being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world? How could you...?

[2] Nash looked up at last and fixed Mackey with an

unblinking

stare as cool

and

dispassionate

as that of any bird or snake.

southern

drawl

, as if talking to himself,

came to

me the

same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously.

[3] The young genius from Bluefield, West Virginia

—

handsome, arrogant, and highly

eccentric

—

burst onto the mathematical scene in 1948. Over the next decade, a decade as notable

for its supreme faith in human rationality as for its dark anxieties about mankind's survival, Nash

proved himself, in the words of the

eminent geometer Mikhail Gromov

,

mathematician of the second half of the century.

architecture, the shape of the universe, the geometry of imaginary spaces, the mystery of

prime

numbers

—

all engaged his wide-ranging imagination. His ideas were of the deep and wholly

unanticipated kind that pushes scientific thinking in new directions.

[4] Geniuses, the mathematician

Paul Halmos

wrote,

like all of us, but very much more so, and the ones who, apparently, have an extra human spark.

We can all run, and some of us can run the mile in less than 4 minutes; but there is nothing that

most of us can do that compares with the creation of the

Great G-minor Fugue

.

was of that mysterious variety more often associated with music and art than with the oldest of all

sciences: It wasn't merely that his mind worked faster, that his memory was more

retentive

, or

that his power of concentration was greater. The flashes of intuition were nonrational. Like other

great mathematical intuitionists

—

Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, Jules Henri Poincaré

,

Srinivasa Ramanujan

—

Nash saw the vision first; constructing the

laborious

proofs long

afterward. But even after he'd try to explain some astonishing result, the actual route he had taken

remained a mystery to others who tried to follow his reasoning.

Donald Newman

, a

mathematician who knew Nash at MIT in the 1950s, used to say about him that

would climb a peak by looking for a path somewhere on the mountain. Nash would climb another

mountain altogether and from that distant peak would shine a

searchlight

back onto the first

peak

[5] No one was more obsessed with originality, more

disdainful

of authority, or more

jealous of his independence. As a young man he was surrounded by the

high priests

of twentieth-

century science

—

Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, and Norbert Wiener

—

but he joined no

school, became no one's

disciple

,

got along

: largely without guides or followers. In almost

everything he did

—

from

game theory

to geometry

—

he

thumbed his nose at

the received

wisdom, current fashions, established methods. He almost always worked alone, in his head,

usually walking, often whistling

Bach

. Nash acquired his knowledge of mathematics not mainly

from studying what other mathematicians had discovered, but by rediscovering their truths for

himself. Eager to astound, he was always

on the lookout for

the really big problems. When he

focused on some new puzzle, he saw dimensions that people who really knew the subject (he

never did) initially dismissed as naive or wrong-headed. Even as a student, his indifference to

others'

skepticism

, doubt, and ridicule was awesome.

[6] Nash's faith in rationality and the power of pure thought was extreme, even for a

very young mathematician and even for the new age of computers, space travel, and nuclear

weapons. Einstein once

chided

him for wishing to amend

relativity theory

without studying

physics. His heroes were solitary thinkers and supermen like

Newton

and

Nietzsche

. Computers

and science fiction were his passions. He considered

superior in some ways to human beings. At one point, he became fascinated by the possibility that

drugs could heighten physical and intellectual performance. He was

beguiled

by the idea of alien

races of hyper-rational beings who had taught themselves to disregard all

emotion.

Compulsively

rational, he wished to turn life's decisions

—

whether to take the first

elevator or wait for the next one, where to bank his money, what job to accept, whether to

marry

—

into calculations of advantage and disadvantage,

algorithms

or mathematical rules

divorced from emotion, convention, and tradition. Even the small act of saying an automatic hello

to Nash in a hallway could elicit a furious

[7] His contemporaries, on the whole, found him immensely strange. They described him

as

aloof

haughty

detached

spooky

mingled rather than mixed with his peers.

Preoccupied

with his own private reality, he seemed

not to share their

mundane

concerns. His manner

—

slightly cold, a bit superior, somewhat

secretive

—

suggested something

punctuated

by

flights of

garrulousness

about outer space and geopolitical trends, childish

pranks

, and

unpredictable eruptions of anger. But these outbursts were,

more often than not

, as

enigmatic

as

his silences.

refrain

. A mathematician at the Institute for

Advanced Study remembers meeting Nash for the first time at a crowded student party at

Princeton:

I noticed him very definitely among a lot of other people who were there. He was sitting

on the floor in a half-circle discussing something. He made me feel uneasy. He gave me a peculiar

feeling. I had a feeling of a certain strangeness. He was different in some way. I was not aware of

the extent of his talent. I had no idea he would contribute as much as he really did.

[8] But he did contribute, in a big way. The marvelous paradox was that the ideas

themselves were not obscure. In 1958,

Fortune

singled

Nash

out

for his achievements in game

theory,

algebraic

geometry, and

nonlinear

theory, calling him the most brilliant of the younger

generation of new

ambidextrous

mathematicians who worked in both pure and applied

mathematics. Nash's insight into the dynamics of human rivalry

—

his theory of rational conflict

and cooperation

—

was to become one of the most influential ideas of the twentieth century,

transforming the young science of economics the way that

Mendel

's ideas of genetic

transmission,

Darwin

's model of natural selection, and Newton's

celestial

mechanics reshaped

biology and physics in their day.

第六课

美丽心灵

西尔维亚

?

纳萨尔

[1]

小约翰

?

福布斯

?

纳什，数学天才、理性行为理论创 立者、预见会思考的机器出

现的预言者，已经和他的同样是数学家的来访者一起坐了差不 多半个小时。那是

1959

年

春季一个 工作日的傍晚时分，虽然才是

5

月，天气却很热，令人不太舒服 。纳什颓然坐在

医院会客室一角的扶手椅上，身上随意穿着的那件尼龙衬衫，松松垮垮地 盖在他没有系皮

带的长裤上。他的魁梧身躯现在就像一个布娃娃一样缺乏活力，他的线条 优美细致的五官

没有任何表情。他一直目光呆滞地盯着哈佛教授乔治

?

麦基左脚前方不远的地方， 除了一

次次重复着将垂在前额的略长的黑发拨开的动作，他几乎一动不动。麦基正襟危坐 ，被沉

默压得透不过气来，并且非常清楚地意识到会客室的所有门都锁上了。麦基再也控 制不住

自己。他尽量使语气温和，但听上去仍有些愠怒。“你，一个数学家，”他开始说 道，

“一个致力于研究理性和逻辑证明的人，怎么能相信外星人正在给你发送消息呢？怎 么能

相信你被来自太空的外星人选中要来拯救世界呢？怎么能……”

[2]

纳什终于抬起头，用类似某种鸟类或者蛇一样冰冷而不动声色的目光，紧紧盯着麦

基 。“因为，”他慢慢地回答，带着温和适度的南方人特有的慢条斯理的语气，好像自言

自 语一般，“我的有关超自然生物的想法出现在我的脑海里的方式，是和我的数学思想一

样 的，所以我会认真对待。”