A review of postings about scientific integrity and intellectual honesty, with observations regarding elite centrism – Part 2: a tale of peace and anti-war politics

(Continued from Part 1)

In my very first blog article, in two parts dated January 29, 2009, I delved into some interesting facts related to Chicago, Illinois, in the context of two contrasting, but distinguished, academic personalities in political activism.

One was the young, brash and condescending, but brilliant elite mathematician John Nash in around 1958-1959, who easily ‘turned down’ Chicago:

“The 1998 book “A Beautiful Mind” by The New York Times correspondent Sylvia Nasar about the mysterious but often sad life stories of the mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., told of the tremendous interest on the part of the University of Chicago’s mathematics department including the mathematician Shiing-shen Chern, a patriarch figure in mathematics, toward an up-and-coming, flamboyant but abrasive John Nash in 1958-1959, who at the time was on the faculty of MIT but was fancying himself as the “the prince of peace”, the leader of a great movement for world peace, and “the left foot of God”; when Prof. Adrian Albert of the University of Chicago made an offer of a “prestigious chair” to John Nash, Nash responded that he had to decline because he was “scheduled to become Emperor of Antarctica”. Such undiplomatic response and related uttering prompted then MIT president Julius Stratton to call John Nash “a very sick man”. Nash, however, confidently told others that he was receiving encrypted, important political “messages” communicating to him through The New York Times.

So in early 1959 the very promising mathematician John Nash chose not to go to Chicago, staying at MIT in Boston and talking out loud about forming a world peace movement, but soon (on or around April 8, 1959), he was involuntarily sent to McLean Hospital, committed and diagnosed as suffering from ‘paranoid schizophrenia’.”

(“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late (Part 2)”, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The other was an also young, outspoken but thoughtful, humbly achieving mathematician whom I referred to as “Steve”, about 10 years later in 1968, who had enjoyed and would again enjoy the Windy City:

“Seeing how great times and endless talents have been consumed in politics by nasty quarrels, harsh retributions and even violence sometimes makes me nostalgic, feeling fortunate that I did my Ph.D. studies under an academic thesis adviser who was always easy going, though sometimes absent-minded and lost in his thoughts. Even though we only communicated on mathematics and science, he who I knew, “Steve” as others affectionately call him whether they agree or disagree with his views, was genuinely peaceful, and sincerely for peace. Not surprisingly, he had had no problem teaching at the University of Chicago during the 1950s fresh with his Ph.D. in mathematics, had no worry going to the Windy City in 1968 though neither as part of the Democratic National Convention nor with the likes of Jerry Rubin and the Chicago Eight (or with William Ayers for that matter), and today still has no qualms returning to work on the campus of the University of Chicago, even if this time in a technological institute of a foreign automaker – for someone his ivory-tower pedigree.”

(Part 2, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As summarized in the first quote above, in 1958-1959 the University of Chicago’s mathematicians would very much like to have John Nash join them and offered him a “prestigious chair”, but Nash, then at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was fancying himself as “the prince of peace” and the leader of a great movement for world peace, and Chicago did not figure in his plan. However, to put it the way Nash did, that he was “scheduled to become Emperor of Antarctica”, was condescending, and so I elaborated in comparison:

“… if John Nash was to be the “Emperor of Antarctica” as he claimed in 1959 when declining to take up a prestigious academic position at the University of Chicago, then how should the modern-time, outspoken Oprah Winfrey be referred to as, whose media empire is based in Chicago? Queen of the Arctic who happened to have been born exactly 55 years before the day of this blog article? What about President Barack Obama, who from 1992 till becoming United States Senator in 2004 was on the faculty of the University of Chicago?^”

(Part 2, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Chicago’s Oprah Winfrey would be “Queen of the Arctic”, and Chicago’s Barack Obama could be, though I did not explicitly state, ‘Crown Prince of the Arctic’.

Honestly, though, back in 1958-59 not many would have thought of Chicago, or any place in the United States, becoming known for great African-American success stories such as Oprah’s and Barack’s, when the American civil rights movement had barely begun.

Antarctica lies on the Earth’s opposite end from the Arctic. Perhaps not coincidental to his notion of “Emperor of Antarctica”, Nash had married Alicia Larde, a women with deep European-South American aristocratic roots, including a possible link to a 19th-century Austrian Crown Prince as I noted:

“John Nash’s wife Alicia Larde came from a background of European-South American blueblood; her father Carlos had worked for the International Red Cross and the League of Nations, and her uncle Enrique, an interpreter at the United Nations in New York, claimed to be the bastard son of the Archduke Rudolf of Austria and published a book about it, The Crown Prince Rudolf: His Mysterious Life After Mayerling…”

(Part 2, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

But prior to his marriage into “European-South American blueblood”, John Nash had attained social pedigrees of his own through academic achievements, such as his education at Princeton University:

“… John Foster Dulles and John Forbes Nash, Jr., both of whose first names and middle initials were ‘John F.’ (as were former U.S. president John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s), were both distinguished alumni of Princeton University in New Jersey (the Dulles collections at Princeton’s Seeley G. Mudd Library are in fact more extensive than the Dulles Papers at the Eisenhower Library), and when Nash was first diagnosed with “paranoid schizophrenia” and committed at a psychiatric ward, in April-May 1959, it would happen to be the period of time when then Secretary of State Dulles in the Eisenhower administration abruptly resigned from the job due to ill health and then died – of cancer – before Nash would be out of McLean Hospital.”

(Part 2, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

As quoted above, John F. Nash was a distinguished alumnus of Princeton like John F. Dulles, in 1958-1959 the U.S. secretary of state, who died of cancer in May 1959 while Nash was committed in McLean Hospital in Boston for “paranoid schizophrenia”.

So compared to the successes of Winfrey and Obama, possible decades later, Nash could have achieved broader fame at that early time but his ambitions were aborted by psychiatric interventions.

But even as early as in 1959 when Nash was in psychiatric committal, the big political tables were turned somewhat, by a ‘new kid in the neighborhood’ named Fidel Castro, as I noted:

“Dulles in fact resigned on the same day, April 15, 1959, that new Cuban leader Fidel Castro arrived in Washington, D.C. to visit the United States at the invitation of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, whose  itinerary would include meetings with acting secretary of state Christian Herter and vice president Richard Nixon and, rather ironically, touring Princeton University and a meeting there with former secretary of state Dean Acheson.”

(Part 2, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The new Cuban leader was a guest of the U.S. press but was diplomatically received by U.S. vice president Richard Nixon, John F. Dulles’s acting replacement Christian Herter, and at Princeton by former secretary of state Dean Acheson, all while Dulles was in hospital dying of cancer.

From this limited, incidental perspective, it is interesting that today it is under President Obama that the United States is normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba, where Fidel Castro has retired from day-to-day politics but his younger brother Raul is firmly at the helm of a ruling Communist system.

(“Barack Obama and Raul Castro meet, launch new era of U.S.-Cuba ties”, by Kevin Liptak and Jim Acosta, April 12, 2015, CNN Politics; and “U.S.-Cuba Relations: From Obama to Castro, Here Are the Key Players”, by Eric Ortiz, July 1, 2015, NBC News)

But again, like I have commented near the start of Part 1 of the current blog article, that is “politics and foreign relations, not science or education”.

As in Part 1, Princeton is a highly prestigious U.S. university where Maria Klawe, my former boss at the University of British Columbia in 1988-1992, with whom I had a political dispute over her academic management style, served as dean of engineering and applied science from 2003 on for 3 and 1/2 years, before becoming president of Harvey Mudd College in California.

In one of my above quotes about John Nash there was the mention that “Princeton’s Seeley G. Mudd Library” houses an extensive collection of archival papers related to John Foster Dulles. Seeley G. Mudd, or Seeley Greenleaf Mudd, whose name endows this Princeton library, is in fact in the same Mudd family as Harvey Mudd, or Harvey Seeley Mudd, whose name endows the college.

(“First Families of the American West: The Mudd Family”, June 30, 2014, The Webb Schools)

The best known of John Nash’s work, one that led to his receiving the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics, traced back to his Ph.D. research at Princeton. The Princeton mathematician John von Neumann who had laid the groundwork for that field, game theory, was a much more dominating figure than Nash; in a February 2013 blog post I quoted an anecdote from Sylvia Nasar’s book, the most credible and detailed public account on John Nash’s life, A Beautiful Mind:

“John von Neumann’s job was giving advice to the American military leaders, even when on his deathbed!

After his intimate participations in advanced military researches during World War II and afterwards, including in the development of the nuclear bomb, John von Neumann died of cancer in 1957 at only 53, and there has been a question whether his premature death had been work-related:

…

In the anecdotes of mathematics, von Neumann was known not only for his brilliance but also for his uptight personality. In my first blog article dated January 29, 2009, I have referred to the life story of the mathematician and Nobel laureate John F. Nash, whose name was made famous by the 2001 Oscar-winning movie “A Beautiful Mind”. The book of the same title, from which the movie was adapted, had recorded the following impression of John von Neumann by John Nash as a young graduate student:

“Nash went to see von Neumann a few days after he passed his generals. He wanted, he had told the secretary cockily, to discuss an idea that might be of interest to Professor von Neumann. It was a rather audacious thing for a graduate student to do. Von Neumann was a public figure, had very little contact with Princeton graduate students outside of occasional lectures, and generally discouraged them from seeking him out with their research problems. But it was typical of Nash, who had gone to see Einstein the year before with the germ of an idea.

Von Neumann was sitting at an enormous desk, looking more like a prosperous bank president than an academic in his expensive three-piece suit, silk tie, and jaunty pocket handkerchief. He had the preoccupied air of a busy executive. At the time, he was holding a dozen consultancies, “arguing the ear off Robert Oppenheimer” over the development of the H-bomb, and overseeing the construction and programming of two prototype computers. …

… Nash started to describe the proof he had in mind for an equilibrium in games of more than two players. But before he had gotten out more than a few disjointed sentences, von Neumann interrupted, jumped ahead to the yet unstated conclusion of Nash’s argument, and said abruptly, “That’s trivial, you know. That’s just a fixed point theorem.””

Like some say, a great mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

(“Guinevere and Lancelot – a metaphor of comedy or tragedy, without Shakespeare but with shocking ends to wonderful lives (Part 2)”, February 28, 2013, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

Nash’s graduate study idea was rejected outright by the famous von Neumann, who was involved in hydrogen bomb development and in advising U.S. military leaders.

But Nash got the attention of junior faculty member David Gale, who encouraged Nash to develop his Ph.D. thesis from it:

“A few days after the disastrous meeting with von Neumann, Nash accosted David Gale. “I think I’ve found a way to generalize von Neumann’s min-max theorem,” he blurted out. “…” Gale recalls Nash’s saying, “I’d call this an equilibrium point.” … Unlike von Neumann, Gale saw Nash’s point. “Hmm,” he said, “that’s quite a thesis.” Gale realized that Nash’s idea applied to a far broader class of of real-world situations than von Neumann’s notion of zero-sum games. “He had a concept that generalized to disarmament,” Gale said later. But Gale was less entranced by the possible applications of Nash’s idea than its elegance and generality. “The mathematics was so beautiful. It was so right mathematically.”

… Gale suggested asking a member of the National Academy of Sciences to submit the proof to the academy’s monthly proceedings. … Gale said recently, “so he gave me his proof and I drafted the NAS note.” … Gale added later, “I certainly knew right away that it was a thesis. I didn’t know it was a Nobel.”

(Sylvia Nasar, A Beautiful Mind, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

David Gale was later a mathematics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where I did teaching assistant work for him and enjoyed the pizzas he ordered for all of us marking final exams.

Maria Klawe and Princeton president Shirley Tilghman who hired her, as in Part 1, were not the only Canadian Princetonians in the context of this blog article: John Nash’s Ph.D. adviser Albert Tucker was “the straitlaced son of a Canadian Methodist minister”, as Nasar put it in her book.

“Steve”, my UC Berkeley Ph.D. adviser Stephen Smale, the politically active academic personality contrasting Nash, also did his Ph.D. study under a one-time Canadian. But Steve, from Flint, Michigan, and educated at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, had family links to Canada through his mother Helen and through his wife Clara’s parents – the former a story of family difficulty and the latter a story of economic loss – all departed for the U.S.:

“Helen’s Canadian parents, Archibald and Pauline Diesfeld Morrow, were married in 1889. They settled in Gault, Ontario, where Archibald was a high school classics teacher. Helen … remembers her father as a “horrible man” who expelled both of her brothers from high school. When Helen was 11, her parents separated …

Remaining with her mother, Helen completed high school and one year of business college. Helen’s brother-in-law was an engineer who worked in a Gault boiler factory. Expecting to lose his job after the War, he and Helen’s sister moved to Flint seeking new opportunities. … In 1925 Helen and her mother followed. …

…

Shortly after returning to Ann Arbor he [Steve Smale] met Clara Davis (unrelated to Chandler Davis), a friend of Ed Shaffer. Smale was attracted to the library science graduate student and acted on his feelings. Clara responded, and they were married a few months later.

Clara’s parents, Harry and Marion Hill Davis, were both born in Ontario. Her father’s ancestors were American Tories who emigrated to Canada during the Revolution. Harry and Marion moved to Alberta and began a wheat farm as homesteaders. In the midtwenties they lost the farm and moved their family to the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, where they had a relative. There Harry made a career change into the insurance business. …”

(Steve Batterson, Stephen Smale: The Mathematician Who Broke the Dimension Barrier, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

Interestingly enough, the parents of Steve Smale’s wife Clara Davis, descendants of British loyalists who had moved to Ontario in Canada due to the American Revolution, moved farther to the Canadian rural heartland of Alberta and lost their farm, before moving to Dearborn near Detroit, Michigan, an industrializing region of the U.S.

The more intriguing context here is that, as in Part 1, Alberta is the home base of Maria Klawe where her family have been deeply entrenched, she received her mathematics Ph.D. and her parents were professors at her alma mater, the University of Alberta.

The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor was where Smale received all his academic degrees, and his first faculty position was at the University of Chicago.

(“Biography: Steve Smale”, Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley)

Michigan was a top public university, but not of the calibre of a top private school like Princeton; the distinguished private University of Chicago was doubtlessly an upward first step for Smale.

For John Nash it was the opposite. Even after he had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and left MIT, without a job in March-April 1963 he rejected an offer for him to do statistical work at Michigan for 2 years while receiving treatment:

“… That Nash desperately needed treatment was not a subject of controversy this time. Once again, Donald Spencer and Albert Tucker approached Robert Winters. James Miller, a friend of Winters from Harvard, was in the psychiatry department at the University of Michigan and was connected with a university-sponsored clinic run by Ray Waggoner. Through Miller, Winters succeeded in making a unique arrangement whereby Nash would be treated at the clinic and also have an opportunity to work as a statistician in the clinic’s research program.

Tucker at Princeton and [math department chair Ted] Martin at MIT decided to set up a fund to make the plan feasible. Anatole Rappaport and Merrill Flood at the University of Michigan… and others committed themselves to raise funds …

The Ann Arbor group felt that a stay of two years was necessary. The cost for out-of-state patient was $9,000 a year or $18,000 for the entire stay. [Nash’s mother] Virginia Nash offered to guarantee $10,000 and the group of mathematicians arranged, through the American Mathematical Society, to set-up a fund-raising drive for the remaining $8,000. …

Albert E. Meder, Jr., the society’s treasurer, was enthusiastic …

…

It was Donald Spencer… who was elected to try to convince Nash to accept the Michigan offer and enter the clinic voluntarily. Spencer chose, as he usually did, a bar as his venue. He invited Nash for some beers in Nassau Tavern, where Nash had once celebrated passing his generals. … Spencer talked and talked, Nash appeared to be listening but said very little except to remark, at various intervals, that he wasn’t interested in doing statistical work. It was no use. Nash didn’t believe that he was ill, and he wasn’t prepared to enter another hospital.

…

Meanwhile, Alicia, Virginia, and [Nash’s sister] Martha had agreed among themselves that Nash would have to be committed involuntarily. This time they chose a private clinic near Princeton.”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

More than a decade earlier Nash had passed his Princeton general exams, celebrated at Nassau Tavern, and gone to see John von Neumann about an original math idea but was shot down, before David Gale helped him pursue it. Now after a promising MIT career cut short by paranoid schizophrenia, he was back hanging around Princeton.

The way I see it, Nash’s life was so immersed in the environments of a few select elite private schools like MIT and Princeton, that he just wasn’t going elsewhere.

But had Nash agreed to move to the University of Michigan in April 1963, his life could have changed dramatically at the end of the two years, not by the psychiatric treatment but by emerging anti-war political activism – given Nash’s once self-anointed “prince of peace” status.

In March 1965, faculty members at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor started the first U.S. university teach-in events as a part of anti-Vietnam War protests. It involved over 220 teachers and 3,000 participants, and would soon be followed by similar events at Columbia University in the City of New York, UCLA, University of Wisconsin, UC Berkeley and dozens of other universities:

“What began as a group of fewer than 10 educators, soon swelled to a group of more than 220 professors who led discussions and speak-outs against the war. And what was expected to be a modest turnout for the 12-hour event, wound up being more than any of the organizers could have anticipated.

…

In total, there were about 3,000 participants. …

…

From the steps of a U-M library, the movement quickly spread. Two days after the teach-in in Ann Arbor, there was another teach-in at Columbia University. Two weeks later, there was one at the University of California, Los Angeles. Subsequent teach-ins were held at Wisconsin, Berkeley, Michigan State, and dozens of other campuses.

…

On April 17, 1965, SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] and some of the U-M professors involved in organizing the teach-in called for a March in Washington, D.C., to protest the war. It turned out to be the largest anti-war demonstration in U.S. history to date, drawing roughly 25,000 people for the march that started at the Capitol and went down the Mall to the Washington Monument.”

(“U-M professors’ first teach-in 50 years ago launched a national movement”, by Jeremy Allen, March 22 (updated March 23), 2015, MLive)

Still, “emperor” and “prince” being the powers of the private state, John Nash might not have been drawn into such public mass events had he been there.

On the day of the first Ann Arbor teach-in event, Steve Smale was among a few Berkeley faculty members speaking at a campus anti-war rally of 1,000 participants in support of the Michigan event.

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

In the fall of 1983 when I went into Smale’s UC Berkeley office for the first time, having just been accepted to be his Ph.D. student, the first thing he drew my attention to was a letter in a picture frame on the wall, signed by Ho Chi Minh, the legendary Communist leader of North Vietnam, thanking Smale for helping the people of Vietnam in their struggle against American imperialist aggression – I can only paraphrase but not recall the contents of the formal thank-you note – and I said that I was from mainland China and knew about the North Vietnamese leader.

That was about the only time Smale and I discussed politics unrelated to the academia. On that occasion Smale also said that I was his first Ph.D. student from the People’s Republic of China.

Due to the lingering effect of McCarthyism, many American intellectuals on the political left tended not to openly discuss politics in depth. But in a sign that the slogan, “Mathematics for the New Century”, I was impressed with in 1989 as discussed in Part 1, was real, in January 2000 the American Mathematical Society published a biography book on Stephen Smale, “Steven Smale: The Mathematician Who Broke the Dimension Barrier” by Steve Batterson, in which Smale’s U.S. Communist Party experience while a student at Ann Arbor was discussed:

“… During Steve’s first years at Michigan his political activity was inconspicuous, limited to occasional events such as a meeting in support of Henry Wallace. When the Korean War began, Smale became more engaged in seeking out forums to demonstrate his opposition. The sincerity of Steve’s beliefs became apparent, and he was assimilated into the LYL [Labor Youth League] community.

Smale became an reliable participant, willing to undertake occasional initiatives and accept the risk of exposure. While Steve was not among the most prominent two or three Marxists on campus, he rose to the next group, “outing” himself as an LYL member in letters to the student newspaper. Steve enjoyed the notoriety associated with having his name in the paper. Eventually he joined the student CP cell. To reveal his membership offered the trade-off between the benefit of further recognition and the risk of the devastating repercussions associated with the McCarthy era. With his CP credential, Steve exercised discretion. He did not even tell his wife about his previous membership until sometime after their marriage. For many years he was cautious in this regard. Despite numerous subsequent investigations by the Michigan State Police, FBI, and HUAC [the House Un-American Activities Committee], Smale’s CP membership remained a secret until he revealed it in the eighties.”

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

According to the above quote, Smale likely revealed his Communist Party membership during the time I was his student; but I was unaware of it, not even of him attending any political rally by this time. But the AMS’s 2000 publication of a biography book on a current mathematician was uncommon, as was its 1963 fundraising for John Nash to work and receive treatment at Michigan.

It was perhaps no coincidence Smale’s political activities had begun with opposition to the Korean War while a Michigan student, and peaked at leading the anti-Vietnam War movement as a Berkeley professor. The 1950s’ political activities Smale was a part of also demonstrated why it was logical over 10 years later the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor became the birthplace of the anti-war movement:

“In his first semester as a graduate student, Steve was involved in a contentious civil liberties case at Michigan. He was an active member of the Young Progressives which attempted to bring two controversial speakers to campus, Arthur McPhaul and Abner Green. McPhaul and Green held positions in the Civil Rights Congress and the American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born. Both organizations had been listed as communist fronts by the attorney general. A university regulation required that advance approval of speakers be obtained from a committee consisting of five professors. …

The University Lecture Committee considered the request in March 1952. Green had just completed a six month jail term for contempt of court. … During the previous week McPhaul had appeared in Detroit at a HUAC subcommittee investigation of alleged communist involvement. …

Rejecting the petitions for speeches by Green and McPhaul, the University Lecture Committee stated that they required evidence that the talks would not be subversive, placing the burden on the applicants. The decision did not close the issue. After an unsuccessful attempt to obtain an off-campus venue for his speech, Green dined at a co-op and spent the night at the campus center building known as the Union. On March 6, the Michigan Daily contained an article reporting that McPhaul would be on campus for the day, visiting residences and attending a private dinner.

Steve was among the 30 dinner guests who heard McPhaul speak at the Union. Did the evening with the banned speaker involve violations of university regulations? …”

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

As quoted, in 1952 of the Korean War era there were U.S. political organizations, the Civil Rights Congress and the American Committee for Protection of the Foreign Born, devoted to causes that sounded like precursors of the 1960s’ civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam War movement; leftist Michigan students planned for on-campus speeches by these organizations’ Arthur McPhaul and Abner Green, and the rejection by a university committee of professors was based on concern for communist subversion – not for the campus activities themselves.

Smale’s attending an informal speech by McPhaul led to repercussions:

“Finally on May 3, verdicts and punishment were announced. All students were cleared of attending the dinner two months earlier. However, Steve and four others were placed on probation for “failure to give the Judiciary the cooperation students should reasonably be expected to give a student disciplinary body.” Appeals were unsuccessful and Smale were obliged to resign offices as secretary-treasurer of the Chess Club and treasurer of the Society For Peaceful Alternatives. …

…

While the two months of university investigations seemed a long ordeal for the students, it paled in comparison to McPhaul’s struggle with the HUAC. The Committee contended that the Fifth Amendment did not shield McPhaul from producing certain documents that they were seeking. After Congress approved a contempt citation, McPhaul was convicted and received a nine month prison sentence. In 1960 the case finally reached the Supreme Court which affirmed the verdict in a 5-4 decision with Douglas, Black, Brennan, and Warren dissenting.”

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

Smale was forced to resign his secretary and treasurer positions at the academically inclined Chess Club and the politically active Society For Peaceful Alternatives – the latter apparently related to his anti-Korean War stand.

But the perceived communist facet in the invited speaker Arthur McPhaul’s general political activities carried the serious consequence of jail – despite the closeness of a U.S. Supreme Court decision.

More than a decade later in 1965, Smale became a high-profile leader of the anti-war movement at Berkeley started by graduate student Jerry Rubin, who had visited Cuba in 1964, and whose politically active girlfriend was more Stanford than Berkeley based. They sought out Smale to partner with:

“The idea of a Berkeley teach-in originated with a young couple, Barbara Gullahorn and Jerry Rubin. For Rubin, later one of the most prominent radicals and characters of the sixties, the teach-in provided his first opportunity for leadership and notoriety. …

…

Gullahorn had arrived in Berkeley in 1960 as an undergraduate at the University. Politically she was a liberal who became inspired by John Kennedy’s vision of the Peace Corps. …

Rubin moved to Berkeley in January 1964, ostensibly to begin graduate study in sociology. He was 26 years old. Full of energy and seeking his niche, Rubin was intrigued by political and social issues. Naturally he was drawn to the Berkeley civil rights protest culture, and quickly transferred from academe to activism, becoming a regular on the picket lines.

… As Gullahorn began to examine her perspectives in a new light, Rubin seized an opportunity to visit Cuba. With her boyfriend’s influence limited to an occasional phone call, Gullahorn reverted back to her liberal mode, returning home to her mother in Palo Alto.

Inspired by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, Rubin returned to California late in the summer. … Rubin followed her to Palo Alto. … Meanwhile the FSM [Free Speech Movement] began in Berkeley without Rubin. …

The Vietnam teach-in provided a new opportunity. …

The upcoming teach-in would provide a real test of the new campus free speech policy, and a professor could be a valuable ally in obtaining use of university facilities. At an early stage of the planning, Rubin and Gullahorn solicited Steve Smale in his office. …”

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

As a Michigan student, Smale had been at the mercy of a committee of professors when it came to campus political activity. Now Smale was a Berkeley professor in charge of faculty political policies, he helped Rubin, and they became co-chairs of UC Berkeley Vietnam Day Committee:

“Smale way approaching a major juncture in his life. At 34 he appeared to have it made. A highly paid professor at a first rate university in the idyllic Bay Area setting, he had already achieved an enviable standing among mathematicians. … However, just as Smale had previously reacted to the Korean War and Cuban Missile Crisis, Rolling Thunder provided a new outrage. He was especially concerned that Vietnam might lead to a war involving the United States and Soviet Union. As chair of the Political Affairs Committee of the Berkeley Faculty Union, Steve had some standing to push the protest.

…

A Rubin-Smale symbiosis quickly formed. Despite their contrasting backgrounds and personalities, Steve and Jerry developed a strong rapport … They became co-chairs of the Vietnam Day Committee (VDC), organizer for the Vietnam Day teach-in beginning on May 21. Following Steve into the VDC were his wife Clara, colleague Moe Hirsch, and graduate student Mike Shub.”

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

Following the teach-in events, in August 1965 the VDC escalated their actions to troop train protests, which were controversial and unsuccessful but garnered media attention:

“On August 4, the VDC [UC Berkeley Vietnam Day Committee] learned that a train would pass through Berkeley on the following day, transporting soldiers to Oakland. …

…

The subsequent front page article in the San Francisco Chronicle estimated that there were 150 demonstrators. The pictures portrayed several of the protesters blocking the tracks as the train approached at 10 mph. If the tactic succeeded and the train stopped, then the VDC would board and lobby the soldiers. However, when the train maintained its speed, each demonstrator was confronted with a decision. It was a tense moment as the protestors withdrew at the last moment…

…

On the next day there were two trains and twice as many demonstrators. … When the train arrived, it slowed to a walking space, as a wedge of police formed in front. The police led the engine for several blocks… The VDC was unprepared for the tactic …

…

Next the VDC moved into the mainstream political arena, petitioning the Berkeley City Council to stop the troop trains. At a Council meeting, Smale urged passage, drawing an analogy to Germans who ignored Nazi atrocities during the Second World War. …

… During this period Steve received a number of death threats, both by mail and phone.”

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

As quoted, there were death threats against Smale. But as courageous as he was, Smale’s leadership role lasted only 6 months, and then the Berkeley anti-war movement went in a direction he disagreed with, after their marches on October 15-16, 1965, failed to enter the neighboring city of Oakland:

“When 10,000 people appeared on campus for the evening march, Smale was gratified by the fruition of his past several months of effort. … A teach-in, however, is a passive act. By marching to Oakland, all of these people were making an active statement of opposition against the War. …

…

Smale wanted “to go up to the Oakland border. Not cross it where police were on the other side. … stay there as long as it took, months.” …

Weinberg operated from a different perspective. … there were problems with the sit-in concept. The crowd was beyond the control of the leaders and some were likely to confront the police rather than sit-in. …

…

Milligan and Rubin sided with Smale. Bardacke and the dazed Weissman deferred to Weinberg whose position prevailed on a 5-4 vote. With the rejection of the sit-in, the marchers were directed on a course parallel to the border. … the crowd headed for a park in downtown Berkeley where festivities continued through the night.

On Saturday afternoon, the VDC made another attempt to reach Oakland. Smale joined a few thousand marchers who, again, were met by police at the Oakland-Berkeley border. This time the impasse was broken by a third party. Several members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang charged through the Oakland police lines, attempting to intimidate the marchers. When the Berkeley police intervened, a few injuries occurred. It was a stunning spectacle that altered the mood of the antiwar demonstration. A short time after the incident, the crowd dispersed.

The International Days of Protest reached a large number of cities including Los Angeles, Chicago, Brussels, and Tokyo as well as the college towns of Boulder, Madison, and Ann Arbor. In New York, over 10,000 protesters marched down Fifth Avenue, while 500 people filled London’s Trafalgar Square. In late May, Smale and Rubin had initiated an effort to establish an international campaign to stop the War. The movement was off the ground.

Despite the success of Smale’s foray into political action, he was demoralized by the turning back of the march. … Smale had lost faith in the VDC’s future. No contract bound Smale to the VDC. Unlike some others in the movement, he had an attractive alternative. Smale was still a Berkeley mathematics professor with prodigious research ability. As abruptly as he had left mathematics for the VDC, Smale switched back after the march.”

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

A year later in August 1966 it would be Smale’s turn to face the potentially more serious consequences, when the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee issued a subpoena for him.

But it happened in a good timing for Smale, as he was already in Europe, on his way to Moscow, the Soviet Union, to attend the 1966 International Congress of Mathematicians held once every 4 years at an international location:

“Unbeknownst to Smale, his whereabouts were a hot topic in the Bay Area. In early August the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) sought to subpoena Steve for testimony later in the month. Some members of Congress were disturbed by the troop train demonstrations and other activities, which they construed as aiding military opponents. …

In the fifties, the prospect of subpoenas provoked dread among members of the Old Left. Recipients, such as Chandler Davis, suffered blacklisting and jail. At that time Steve’s leftist activities narrowly escaped the public scrutiny of the HUAC. Now, as the former cochair of the VDC and leader of the troop train protests, he was too prominent. Moreover, the HUAC always had a thing for college professors. Subpoenas were issued for Smale, Jerry Rubin, and several others. …

Serving Smale was problematic. At the time he was somewhere in Yugoslavia, on a roundabout course to the ICM in Moscow. … the San Francisco Examiner … story ran under the headline “UC Prof Dodges Subpoena. Skips U.S. for Moscow:”

Dr. Stephen Smale. University of California professor and leader of the Vietnam Day Committee and old Free Speech Movement, is either on his way or is in Moscow. The Examiner learned today.

In leaving the country, he had dodged a subpoena directing him to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in Washington.”

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

Smale arrived late in Moscow, just missing the awarding of the Fields Medal, the highest award of mathematics, to him, but catching a tribute speech about him:

“… Smale was prohibited from boarding the only Athens-Moscow flight of the day. … A last moment technicality was depriving him of the greatest moment of Fields acclaim. Eventually, Steve obtained the assistance of an American embassy official who successfully intervened on his behalf. Smale was on a plane the following day, and the timing was tight:

“I arrived late in Moscow and rushed from the airport to the Kremlin where I was to receive the Fields Medal at the opening ceremonies of the International Congress. Without a registration badge the guards at the gate refused me admission to the palace. Finally, through the efforts of a Soviet mathematician who knew me, I obtained entrance and found a rear seat. René Thom was speaking about me and my work:

…

Steve had just missed the opportunity to formally receive the award, but he did hear Thom’s tribute to his risk taking. An anonymous gift permitted the award of four Fields Medals in 1966. The other winners were:

Michael Atiyah, 37, England, Oxford University

Paul Cohen, 32, USA, Stanford University

Alexander Grothendieck, 38, Germany, University of Paris”

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

What an irony in the above story, that an American under Congressional subpoena related to un-American activities got the assistance of an American diplomat to go to Moscow’s Kremlin Palace – of all the places on Earth.

Smale was awarded the Fields Medal for his innovative approach to the Poincare Conjecture, solving a generalized version that “broke the dimension barrier”.

While in Moscow, the North Vietnamese Press Agency’s Moscow correspondent Hoang Thinh wanted to interview Smale. Smale agonized over his sense of obligation versus the risk to his career, as he later recalled:

“I felt a great debt and obligation to the Vietnamese. After all it was my country that was causing them so much pain. … On the other hand, I was a mathematician, with compelling geometric ideas to be translated into theorems. There was a limit to my ability to survive as a scientist and weather further political storms. … I knew that what I said might come out quite differently in the North Vietnamese newspaper, and even more so when translated back into the U.S. press.”

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

Smale decided to hold an open news conference, inviting the North Vietnamese reporter, the American press and the Soviet press. Now the North Vietnamese reporter decided not to attend but Smale went ahead, voicing condemnation of both the United States and the Soviet Union on military intervention and on oppression of political freedom:

“I believe the American military intervention in Vietnam is horrible and becomes more horrible every day. I have great sympathy for the victims of this intervention, the Vietnamese people. However, in Moscow today, one cannot help but remember that it was only 10 years ago that Russian troops were brutally intervening in Hungary and that many courageous Hungarians died fighting for their independence. Never could I see justification for military intervention. …

There is a real danger of a new McCarthyism in America, as evidenced in the actions of the House Un-American Activities Committee. These actions are a serious threat to the right of protest, both in the hearings and in the legislation they are proposing. Again saying this in the Soviet Union, I feel I must add that what I have seen here in the discontent of the intellectuals on the Sinyavsky-Daniel trial and their lack of means of expressing this discontent, shows indeed a sad state of affairs. Even the most basic means of protest are lacking here. …”

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

The fine line might be harder to walk than it appeared, given that Smale had been a Communist Party member in the closet.

But Smale would be okay, as the HUAC hearings in Washington, D.C. were filled with hostile anti-war demonstrators cheering their hero Jerry Rubin, who appeared in a Revolutionary War uniform:

“The hearing room and halls were filled with antiwar demonstrators. The HUAC was going to have an overtly hostile audience. … Rubin entered, dressed in a Revolutionary War uniform, passing out pamphlets explaining the symbolism.

… Throughout the first day, the hearings were interrupted by belligerent demonstrations. There were 17 arrests, including two of the witnesses. Spectators painted slogans on the wall. Rubin became a hero of the radical youth culture, inspiring a new left style that would set a standard for courageous courtroom contempt.”

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

Nonetheless, the deputy district attorney of Alameda County, 30-year-old Edwin Meese III, politely reminded the HUAC of Smale’s leadership role in the troop train demonstrations:

“Mr. Nittle.     Mr. Meese, would you describe the incident or incidents concerning the troop trains?

Mr. Meese.     The troop train demonstrations, which is probably the best known of the activities, took place on the 5th of August 1965, the 6th of August 1965, and the 12th of August. On the 5th of August, the demonstrations were led by Stephen Smale, who is one of the witnesses that I believe the committee is familiar with. I believe he was to be subpoenaed as a witness, but was not able to be served, if I understand correctly. …”

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

As Edwin Meese said, Smale was a person the HUAC was “familiar with”.

Smale did not want to endanger his mathematical career, but some damages were already done. For some years afterwards, Smale had difficulty getting National Science Foundation research grants due to objections raised by a number of U.S. Congressmen; appeals for Smale came from the academic community, including from his former Michigan Ph.D. adviser, Raoul Bott of Harvard University:

“Raoul Bott, professor of Mathematics who, incidentally, directed Smale’s doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan some fifteen years ago, and five others whose names were withheld from the press, sent a letter yesterday to the director of the NSF, Leland J. Haworth. In it, Bott referred to what he called “political pressures” which affected the NFS’s decision to reject Smale’s request for a continuation of his present grant.

On The Steps

Smale’s problems began in the summer of 1966, when he traveled to Russia under his grant to accept the Fields Award, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of mathematics. Once in Moscow, Smale climed the steps of the University there and denounced the American position in Vietnam, Soviet maltreatment of intellectuals, and Soviet foreign policy, paticularly in respect to the Hungarian uprising.

Several congressmen, led by Rep. Richard L. Roudebush (R.-Ind.) quickly attacked Smale and threatened the NSF for financing a trip used for what they called “anti-American purposes.””

(“Math Professors Question Denial Of Smale Grant”, by Andrew Jamison, October 5, 1967, The Harvard Crimson)

The academic community’s support for Smale swayed the NSF. A decision was made to split the proposed large grant Smale was the lead principal investigator of, with 7 other US. mathematicians, into two smaller grants of 4 persons each:

“… The actual split of grants between global analysis with Smale and differential geometry with [Shoshichi] Kobayashi was, in itself, a perfectly reasonable scientific division. So why was everyone unhappy?

Roudebush believed that Smale’s “disloyalty” made him unworthy of any government support. …

…”

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

Rep. Richard Roudebush then upped the ante, venting his frustration on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives:

“Smale is the college instructor who used Federal funds to visit Moscow and
call a press conference to denounce his native land.

Smale is the person who led leftist attack on troop trains in California.

Smale is the one who belonged to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee—the same pro-Castro group which claimed Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy, as a member.

Smale is the person quoted in California as hoping for a Vietcong victory as
an important step in revolutionary success in America.

Smale is the close associate of the notorious Jerry Rubin who was a key
figure in the recent siege on the Pentagon which has been established as a
Communist-organized and Communist-led assault.

Despite all of these actions and associations the National Science Foundation has designated Smale, a math Instructor, as the recipient of $87,500.

…

Since last spring, when I announced the National Science Foundation was
getting set to underwrite with taxpayer funds another huge grant for Smale. the NSF has been stalling.

At one point they indicated Smale would get no money, and found that he
had mishandled his former grant on a number of counts.

But, at this first slight stiffening of the backbone, the full fury of the academic community fell in one swoop upon the NSF.

…”

(“CONGRESSIONAL RECORD — HOUSE”, November 28, 1967, Mocavo)

Regarding the counts in Rep. Roudebush’s accusations, the Moscow press conference and troop train demonstrations have been discussed, and association with Jerry Rubin was obvious in the context of the VDC as discussed earlier, while Smale’s opinion that a Vietcong victory could be an important step in revolutionary success in America no doubt reflected his hidden Communist affiliation.

The remaining issue raised by Roudebush, to be addressed here, is Smale’s membership in the Fair Play for Cuba Committee which “Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin of President Kennedy”, was a member of.

Smale had probably joined the Fair Play for Cuba committee at an early time of the Cuban revolution:

“After his militancy at university, Smale – as we have seen – returned to his mathematical studies in earnest. His political sympathies were, however, still decidedly leftist. This is why he didn’t hesitate to side with Castro’s revolution (even getting in touch with an organization named “Fair Play for Cuba”, with which Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s assassin, was also involved for a period of time).”

(Claudio Bartocci, Renato Betti, Angelo Guerraggio, Roberto Lucchetti and Kim Williams, eds., Mathematical Lives: Protagonists of the Twentieth Century From Hilbert to Wiles, October 2010, Springer Science & Business Media)

The Lee Harvey Oswald facet became like an urban myth about Smale, but there was no evidence of anything. Smale was only the Berkeley local faculty adviser for the Fair Play for Cuba Committee:

“Although Berkeley radicals lacked an ideology, they shared a worldview. Throughout the sixties they were hostile to industrial capitalism, to liberals, and especially to the anticommunist crusade. Many, like Jerry Rubin, became fascinated by the rise of the Third World and, especially, the triumph of Fidel Castro; Rubin visited Cuba in 1964. The leftist Fair Play for Cuba Committee had been active in Berkeley in the early sixties. Its members included Mike Miller, the former chairman of SLATE; Barbara Carson of the Young Socialist Alliance; and Robert Scheer. The group’s faculty adviser was Stephen Smale, a professor of mathematics with Left sympathies. …”

(W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War : The 1960s, May 1989, Oxford University Press)

Moreover, the U.S. government commission headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren, a former California Governor, concluded in 1964 that Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. marine and defector to the Soviet Union who returned to the U.S. in June 1962, made contacts with various U.S. political organizations but his associations with them were less than genuine:

“… During the period following his discharge from the Marines in 1959, Oswald engaged in several activities which demand close scrutiny to determine whether, through these pursuits, he developed any associations which were connected with the planning or execution of the assassination. Oswald professed commitment to Marxist ideology; he defected to the Soviet Union in 1959; he attempted to expatriate himself and acquire Soviet citizenship; and he resided in the Soviet Union until June of 1962. After his return to the United States he sought to maintain contacts with the Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party, and the Fair Play for Cuba Committee; he associated with various Russian-speaking citizens in the Dallas-Fort Worth area–some of whom had resided in Russia; he traveled to Mexico City where he visited both the Cuban and Soviet Embassies 7 weeks before the assassination; and he corresponded with the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. In view of these activities, the Commission has instituted a thorough investigation … The Commission has also considered whether any connections existed between Oswald and certain right-wing activity in Dallas which, shortly before the assassination, led to the publication of hostile criticism of President Kennedy.

…

Fair Play for Cuba Committee.—During the period Oswald was in New Orleans, from the end of April to late September 1963, he was engaged in activity purportedly on behalf of the now defunct Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC), an organization centered in New York which was highly critical of U.S. policy toward the Cuban Government under Fidel Castro. …

…

With his membership card, Oswald apparently received a copy of the constitution and bylaws for FPCC chapters, and a letter, dated May 29, which read in part as follows (with spelling as in original):

It would be hard to conceive of a chapter with as few members as seem to exist in the New Orleans area. I have just gone through our files and find that Louisiana seams somewhat restricted for Fair Play activities. …

We certainly are not at all adverse to a very small Chapter but certainly would expect that there would be at least twice the amount needed to conduct a legal executive board for the Chapter. …

You must realize that you will come under tremendous pressures with any attempt to do FPCC work in that area and that you will not be able to operate in the manner which is conventional here in the north-east. … Most Chapters have discovered that it is easier to operate semi-privately out of a home and maintain a P.O. Box for all mailings and public notices. … We do have a serious and often violent opposition and this procedure helps prevent many unnecessary incidents which frighten away prospective supporters. I definitely would not recommend an office, at least not one that will be easily identifiable to the lunatic fringe in your community. …

… the FPCC chapter which Oswald purportedly formed in New Orleans was entirely fictitious. Vincent T. Lee, formerly national director of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, has testified that the New York office did not authorize the creation of a New Orleans chapter, nor did it provide Oswald with funds to support his activities there. The national office did not write Oswald again after its letter of May 29. …”

(“Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, Chapter 6: Investigation of Possible Conspiracy”, 1964, The U.S. National Archives)

The advice to Lee Harvey Oswald, from the Fair Play for Cuba Committee headquarters in New York City, concerned self-protective operational tactics; in any case the Warren Commission report concluded Oswald did not do real work.

But I do note the coincidences that the FPCC New York headquarters letter’s date was May 29, 1963 – what turned out to be JFK’s last birthday – and that Smale was a professor at Columbia University in the City of New York from 1961 on until returning to UC Berkeley in 1964.

On a side note, Smale was so angry at President Kennedy during the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and fearful of an imminent nuclear war, that he abandoned his Columbia teaching duty and took his family south toward Mexico – an episode described in Steve Batterson’s biography of Smale:

“… What was Steve’s initial response to the Cuban Missile Crisis?

I reacted strongly to the growing threat that atomic war could start any day. I became intensely angry at Kennedy, being aware that the United States already had missiles located on the Soviet border in Turkey. When I became convinced that Soviet missiles were en route to Cuba, I became angry at Khrushchev as well. …

So, Clara and I with Nat and Laura packed a few of our belongings and started driving to Mexico!

… He saw a “reasonably good chance that there would be an atom bombing of America by Russia. To stay was to risk his life and to leave was to risk his job. … Prior to leaving, Steve informed Abraham and Lang of his plans. The two colleagues were supportive, and undertook to cover Smale’s class. As the Smale family approached the Mexican border, the missile crisis abated. When Steve phoned Columbia and learned that he was still a member of the faculty, he decided to fly back and resume his teaching, leaving Clara to drive the children. …”

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

Holy smoke! I personally have never seen Steve panic, who was capable of taking a sailboat around Pacific Ocean with a few mathematician friends – something I once mentioned in a fictionalized story in a blog post.

(“Flintstones, candles, fires, and tea parties”, May 27, 2010, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

Smale’s connection to Jerry Rubin was the most publicly known and real, but lasted only a short period – Smale then returned to his academic career while Rubin continued to push the anti-war movement wider and towards militancy.

In August 1968 in Chicago protesting at the Democratic National Convention, Rubin was a militant leader of thousands of protesters, while Smale headed a peaceful small group from the American Mathematical Society:

“A Washington antiwar protest in October 1967 had elements of deja vu from Berkeley two years earlier. Jerry Rubin was the project director, though Abbie Hoffman replaced Steve Smale as his partner. Original plans involved a march to the Capitol. Rubin decided that the Pentagon was a better destination. Years later he acknowledged that his choice of the Pentagon was influenced by his collaboration with Smale on the Oakland Army Terminal. …

…

The next domestic battleground was in Chicago at the August 1968 Democratic convention. Thousands of protesters arrived, many looking for action. Jerry Rubin was among the leaders promoting militancy. Again he got it. Television dramatically covered a series of violent confrontations between police and demonstrators. It was as big a story as the politics. Not all of the Chicago protests led to bloodshed. The Democratic Convention coincided with an American Mathematical Society conference in Wisconsin that Smale attended. About 50 to 100 mathematicians went to Chicago to make their statement. Smale directed them on a protest march. They passed the police without incident. With some pride, Smale recalls they were the only group that got close to the convention center.”

(Steve Batterson, January 2000, American Mathematical Society)

As National Public Radio recalled, the Chicago police and military presence to face the anti-war protests resembled in the Vietnam War:

“The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago is remembered more for the violent riots on the streets that took place than it is for political events inside the hall.

Protesters who opposed the Vietnam War clashed with Mayor Richard Daley’s police in numbers that rivaled some of the smaller battles of the conflict in Southeast Asia. Daley put nearly 12,000 cops on the street. They attacked demonstrators with tear gas and billy clubs, assisted by 7,500 Army troops, 7,500 National Guardsmen and 1,000 agents of the U.S. Secret Service.

…

The Chicago riots led to nearly 600 arrests, and a handful of those made U.S. courtroom history. The “Chicago 8” — including YIPPIE leaders Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and Black Panther founder Bobby Seale — were charged under the 1968 Civil Rights act, which made it a federal crime to cross state lines to incite a riot. …”

(“Conventions Past, 1968: Antiwar Riots Engulf Democrats”, Election 2000, NPR Online)

Eight protest leaders, including Jerry Rubin, were put on a conspiracy trial. Due to his disruptive courtroom antics Black Panther leader bobby Seale was separately dealt with by the judge, and the Chicago 8 became the Chicago 7:

“… Judge Hoffman refused Seale’s subsequent request to represent himself, and Seale responded with a barrage of courtroom denunciations of the judge as a “pig,” a “fascist,” and a “racist.” When the prosecuting attorney accused Seale of encouraging Black Panthers in the courtroom to defend him, the proceedings degenerated into worse shouting matches. Seale condemned the judge for keeping a picture of the slave owner George Washington above the bench, and Hoffman then followed through on his repeated warning to restrain Seale. In what provided for many the indelible image of the trial, Judge Hoffman ordered U.S. marshals to bind and gag Seale before his appearances in the courtroom. Hoffman allowed Seale in court without restraints the following week, but when Seale argued for his right to cross-examine a witness, Judge Hoffman sentenced him to four years in prison for contempt of court and declared a mistrial in the prosecution of Seale. The Chicago Eight were now the Chicago Seven.”

(“The Chicago Seven Conspiracy Trial”, History of the Federal Judiciary, U.S. Federal Judiciary Center)

The 5 convicted from the Chicago 7 were from disparate anti-war groups:

“In the fall of 1967, members of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam proposed a massive anti-war demonstration to coincide with the expected renomination of President Johnson in Chicago. The National Mobilization Committee was directed by David Dellinger, a long-time pacifist, who had organized the march on the Pentagon in October 1967. In early 1968, the National Mobilization opened a Chicago office directed by Rennie Davis and Tom Hayden, who were leading political organizers and former leaders of Students for a Democratic Society.

A small group of cultural radicals, including Jerry Rubin, who helped Dellinger organize the march on the Pentagon, and Abbie Hoffman, an organizer of political theater events, planned a “Festival of Life” to counter the Democratic “Convention of Death.” Rubin and Hoffman dubbed themselves the Yippie movement, later explained as an acronym for the Youth International Party. They planned outdoor concerts, nonviolent self-defense classes, guerrilla theater, and a “nude-in” on a Chicago beach.”

(History of the Federal Judiciary, U.S. Federal Judiciary Center)

Eventually on November 21, 1972, all convictions for the 5 leaders were overturned on appeal:

“On November 21, 1972, an appeals court panel of Judges Thomas E. Fairchild, Wilbur J. Pell, and Walter J. Cummings unanimously overturned the defendants’ criminal convictions.”

(History of the Federal Judiciary, Federal Judiciary Center)

The street protest clashes led by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman of the Yippies and leaders of the other national anti-war groups, such as at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, were not yet militant terror. But by the time of their criminal verdicts’ overturn in 1972, violence carried out by the organization Weather Underground overshadowed the anti-war movement:

“… The killings at Kent State University in May 1970 had changed forever the youth protest movement, which lost much of its political focus. Left-wing political groups like the Students for a Democratic Society had since splintered, leaving older leaders like Tom Hayden permanently alienated from the increasingly violent agenda of groups like the Weather Underground.”

(History of the Federal Judiciary, Federal Judiciary Center)

The most prominent former leader of the Weather Underground is William Ayers who, like Steve Smale, had come out the student movement at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. Ayers eventually settled back to his hometown of Chicago.

A The New York Times article on Ayers was published on September 11, 2001 – intriguingly the day of the 9/11 Al Qaeda terrorist attacks in the U.S.:

““I don’t regret setting bombs,” Bill Ayers said. “I feel we didn’t do enough.” Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970’s as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. …

Now he has written a book, “Fugitive Days” (Beacon Press, September). Mr. Ayers, who is 56, calls it a memoir, somewhat coyly perhaps, since he also says some of it is fiction. He writes that he participated in the bombings of New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, of the Capitol building in 1971, the Pentagon in 1972. …

…

Mr. Ayers is probably safe from prosecution anyway. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said there was a five-year statute of limitations on Federal crimes except in cases of murder or when a person has been indicted.

Mr. Ayers, who in 1970 was said to have summed up the Weatherman philosophy as: “Kill all the rich people. Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, kill your parents, that’s where it’s really at,” is today distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. And he says he doesn’t actually remember suggesting that rich people be killed or that people kill their parents, but “it’s been quoted so many times I’m beginning to think I did,” he said. “It was a joke about the distribution of wealth.”

He went underground in 1970, after his girlfriend, Diana Oughton, and two other people were killed when bombs they were making exploded in a Greenwich Village town house. With him in the Weather Underground was Bernardine Dohrn, who was put on the F.B.I.’s 10 Most Wanted List. J. Edgar Hoover called her “the most dangerous woman in America” and “la Pasionara of the Lunatic Left.” Mr. Ayers and Ms. Dohrn later married.

…

Between 1970 and 1974 the Weathermen took responsibility for 12 bombings…

…

… Mr. Ayers pointed to Bob Kerrey, former Democratic Senator from Nebraska, who has admitted leading a raid in 1969 in which Vietnamese women and children were killed. “He committed an act of terrorism,” Mr. Ayers said. “I didn’t kill innocent people.”

Mr. Ayers has always been known as a “rich kid radical.” His father, Thomas, now 86, was chairman and chief executive officer of Commonwealth Edison of Chicago, chairman of Northwestern University and of the Chicago Symphony. When someone mentions his father’s prominence, Mr. Ayers is quick to say that his father did not become wealthy until the son was a teenager. He says that he got some of his interest in social activism from his father. …

…

He attended Lake Forest Academy in Lake Forest, Ill., then the University of Michigan but dropped out to join Students for a Democratic Society.

In 1967 he met Ms. Dohrn in Ann Arbor, Mich. She had a law degree from the University of Chicago and was a magnetic speaker …

…

Ms. Dohrn, Mr. Ayers and others eventually broke with S.D.S. to form the more radical Weathermen…”

(“No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen”, by Dinitia Smith, September 11, 2001, The New York Times)

As in the above story, Weather Underground engaged in terrorist bombings causing damages to important government buildings but – presumably due to careful selection of location and time – little human casualty; three bomb makers were however killed in an accidental explosion.

Sylvia Nasar’s book told of a story when a teenaged John Nash, in his hometown of Bluefield, West Virginia, was linked to a similar incident that killed his friend Herman Kirchner:

“When he was fifteen, Nash and a couple of boys from across the street, Donald Reynolds and Herman Kirchner, began fooling around with homemade explosives. They gathered in Kirchner’s basement, which they called their “laboratory,” where they made pipe bombs and manufactured their own gunpowder. … The bombmaking came to a horrible end one afternoon in January 1944. Herman Kirchner, who was alone at the time, was building yet another pipe bomb when it exploded in his lap, severing an artery. He bled to death in the ambulance that came for him. …”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

Bill Ayers and President Barack Obama had some Chicago connections, I wrote in my first blog post:

“… being a Democratic politician from the state of Illinois, Senator Barack Obama was very careful during his recent 2008 presidential campaign, avoiding controversies by distancing himself from some of his old acquaintances on the political left such as his (former) pastor, the flamboyant Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and his former Chicago Annenberg Challenge colleague, the defiant Prof. William Ayers, each step of the way. ”

(“Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late (Part 1)”, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Completely absent from any stage of this gradual escalation of grassroots anti-war activities, from university teach-ins to street marches, to violent clashes with police and to terrorist bombings, was the elite mathematician John Nash.

Nash had tried to start a peace movement in 1958-1959 when the conflict in Vietnam was only simmering, but was soon diagnosed with “paranoid schizophrenia”; otherwise Nash could have been a “borderline, nonviolent precursor” to these later movements, I noted in my first blog article:

“Now there could indeed be something there in 1959, meaning that the talented young mathematician might have in fact been capable of figuring out some crucial politics ahead of time – his credibility bolstered by his prior background of doing research at RAND. One can look at it this way: in January 1959 Fidel Castro’s revolution was winning in Cuba, an island just a stone’s throw across the water from the United States, and North Vietnamese communists were also adopting a path of “armed struggle” to unify with the South against the backdrop of increasing U.S. military assistance to South Vietnam; it was not like signs of warning did not exist for the turbulent decade ahead, and ten years later by 1969 when the Vietnam War was in full force and the St. Stephen’s Day-born American leftist William Ayers was founding the militant-resistance organization Weather Underground to engage in a series of high-profile, violent bombings in the United States for radical causes, John Nash’s thoughts by then could have been viewed as a borderline, nonviolent precursor to these later actions of Ayers and his associates; but by then Nash’s expressions had already been concluded as thoughts of “madness” by some (but not all) psychiatrists, and by the authorities.”

(Part 2, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

But what did Nash actually do in this respect in 1958-1959?

I have reconstructed a credible picture from the convoluted accounting in Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind.

From the start, seriousness and bizarreness were so mixed that people around Nash could not quite believe him.

Around Thanksgiving 1958, two of Nash’s students, Ramesh Cangolli and Alberto Galmarino, thought he might be out of his mind:

“… Just before Thanksgiving, Nash had invited his TA from the game theory course, Ramesh Cangolli, and Alberto Galmarino, a student from the course whom he was helping to choose a dissertation topic, to accompany him on a walk. As they walked over the Harvard Bridge on the Charles River late one afternoon, Nash embarked on a lengthy monologue that was difficult to follow for the two, who had just come to the United States. It concerned threats to world peace and calls for world government. Nash seemed to be confiding in the two young men, hinting that he had been asked to play some extraordinary role. Cangolli recalled that he and Galmarino were quite disturbed and that they wondered briefly if they should inform Martin that something was not quite right. Awed as they were by Nash, and new as they were to America – and so reluctant to form any judgments – they decided to say nothing.”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

Imagine if it had been Bill Ayers at Ann Arbor, or Steve Smale at Berkeley, speaking with others about starting a political action group, no one would have found it strange. But MIT was an elite private school with technical focuses, and John Nash had not been a political activist and so it was odd – especially for new foreign students concerned with adjusting to the environment and excelling in academics.

In January 1959, Nash used The New York Times to impress his colleagues, who found it hard to believe him:

“… Nash slouched into the common room. Nobody bothered to stop talking. Nash was holding a copy of The New York Times. Without addressing anyone in particular, he walked up to Hartley Rogers and some others and pointed to the story on the upper lefthand corner of the Times front page, the off-lede, as Times staffers call it. Nash said that abstract powers from outer space, or perhaps it was foreign governments, were communicating with him through The New York Times. The messages, which were meant only for him, were encrypted and required close analysis. Others couldn’t decode the messages. He was being allowed to share the secrets of the world. Rogers and the others looked at each other. Was he joking?

Emma Duchane recalled driving with Nash and Alicia. She recalled that “he kept changing from station to station. We thought he was just being pesky. But he thought that they were broadcasting messages to him. The things he did were mad, but we didn’t really know it.”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

As the saying goes, “read between the lines”; experienced communicators, including writers and broadcasters, are good at conveying meanings beyond the direct content and intent of the words. But some psychiatrists could view it as psychosis when a person interpreted hidden meanings as personal messages. In my own experience of political activism in 1992-1994 in Vancouver, Canada, some psychiatrists accused me of being delusional, thinking of TV broadcast as sending me messages, and I clarified that I was merely interpreting the meanings “between the lines”.

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 9) — when individual activism ranks at oblivion”, October 26, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

John Nash was a highly intelligent and intellectual man, or he would not have been awarded the Nobel Prize later; likewise, if he had really become ludicrous, the Nobel committee probably would not have taken his earlier work as seriously.

Sylvia Nasar, who earned fame with her book on Nash, was a The New York Times correspondent and would know what the newspaper’s writers liked to put into “the off-lede”, or other, articles.

What disturbed others to wonder if Nash was “joking”, I think, was his sense of elite self-importance, that in The New York Times were messages “only for him” that “others couldn’t decode”.

The ‘coded messages’ mindset may have come from Nash’s prior background as a consultant with “a top-secret security clearance” at RAND Corporation, a U.S. Cold War policy think tank, from which he had been fired in 1954 due to a homosexual scandal:

“… Nash had a top-secret security clearance. He’d been picked up in a “police trap.” …

…

Nash was not the first RAND employee to be caught in one of the Santa Monica police traps. Muscle Beach… was a magnet for bodybuilders and the biggest homosexual pickup scene in the Malibu Bay area. …

… [RAND’s manager of security Richard] Best and his boss, Steve Jeffries, went around to Nash’s office and confronted him with the bad news themselves. … Best’s manner was unthreatening but direct and he proceeded calmly. RAND would be forced immediately to suspend Nash’s Air Force clearance. The Air Force would be notified. And – this was the bottom line – Nash’s consulting arrangement with RAND was over for good.

“You’re too rich for our blood, John,” he concluded.”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

Mailing out letters to foreign ambassadors about “forming a world government” was another instance of Nash’s sense of elite self-importance:

“Strange letters began turning up in the department mail. Ruth Goodwin, the department secretary, would put them aside and show them to Martin. They were addressed to ambassadors of various countries. And they were from John Nash. …

What was in the letters? None have survived, but various people recalled hearing from Martin that Nash was forming a world government. There was a committee that consisted of Nash and various students and colleagues in the department. The letters were addressed to all the embassies in Washington, D.C. The letter said he was forming a world government. He wanted to talk to the ambassadors. Later he would talk to the heads of state.”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

Nash’s senior colleague Norman Levinson told their boss, mathematics department chair Ted Martin, that Nash was “very paranoid”; Martin agreed, tried to stop Nash’s political activity, and apparently informed MIT president about it:

“… When Martin returned, Levinson took him aside and told him that Nash was having a nervous breakdown. … Martin recalled, “Levinson said, ‘He’s very paranoid. If you go down to his office, he won’t want you between him and the door.’ Sure enough, when I went down to his office that Sunday night, Nash edged himself over between me and the door.”

… Martin panicked. He tried to retrieve the letters, not all of which were addressed and most of which weren’t stamped, from mailboxes around the campus.

…

Martin was in a most awkward position. The faculty, after some internal dissension, had just voted on Nash’s promotion, and it was now before the president of the university. He dithered and delayed.”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

On this count, Nash’s MIT colleagues Levinson and Martin, both with power influence over the more junior Nash, could be biased and in a conflict of interest. Both were known former Communist Party members – previously investigated by the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953 – and so could have a motive against Nash’s kind of political activism:

“… FBI investigators were fanning out around Cambridge … Their targets, as Nash and everyone else at MIT would learn in early 1953, included the chairman and the deputy chairman of the MIT mathematics department, as well as a tenured full professor of mathematics, Dirk Struik – all three one-time members, indeed, leading members, of the Cambridge cell of the Communist Party. All three were subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. …

…

… Martin and Levinson were certain that they were about to lose their jobs …

…

Martin and several others named their former associates. Norman Levinson refused to name anyone who had not been previously named. …

…

Thanks to MIT’s support and the compromises they struck, Levinson and the others kept their jobs. …”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

In comparison to Ted Martin’s recollection that Nash had tried to form a “world government”, Nash’s wife Alicia recalled Nash wanting to start “an international organization”:

“… He complained that he “knew something was going on” and that he was being “bugged.” And he was staying up nights writing strange letters to the United Nations. …

…

He started to threaten to take all of his savings out of the bank and move to Europe. He had some idea, it seemed, of forming an international organization. And he began to stay up, night after night, long after she had gone to bed, writing. In the morning, his desk would be covered with sheets of paper covered in blue, green, red, and black ink. They were addressed not just to the U.N. but to various foreign ambassadors, the pope, even the FBI.”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

Given his choices of the U.N., the pope and the FBI to write to, Nash may have suspected he was being “bugged” by the U.S. government.

The U.N. choice was probably also influenced by Alicia’s family background, including her father Carlos Larde previously with the League of Nations – the U.N.’s predecessor – and her uncle Enrique, the self-proclaimed “bastard son” of a 19th-century Austrian Crown Prince, with the U.N. in New York:

“… Alicia’s uncle Enrique believed himself to be the bastard son of one of the Austrian Hapsburgs, Archduke Rudolf. Family legend also included a link with an aristocratic French family, the Bourbons. … The Lardes, mostly doctors, professors, lawyers, and writers, … mingled with presidents and generals …

Carlos Larde got his medical training in El Salvador but spent several years studying abroad, in America and France, among other places. … He held a number of public posts, including that of head of El Salvador’s Red Cross and, before World War II, was chairman of a League of Nations committee. Once he served as El Salvador’s consul in San Francisco. …

…

… Less than a year after the war ended, they followed Enrique’s family to New York, where Enrique took a job as an interpreter at the United Nations. …”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

His marriage into European-South American blueblood greatly influenced Nash’s outlook, whose father, John, Sr., had been an engineer in his career and Nash the son had grown up in Bluefield, West Virginia, a “remote little city” according to Sylvia Nasar. Not long after his father’s death, the wedding of Nash, Jr. and Alicia Larde took place in a church across from the White House in Washington, D.C.:

“In early September [1956], John Sr. suffered a massive heart attack. Virginia had a difficult time reaching Nash, who had no telephone. By the time she got a message to him, his father was already dead. …

…

The wedding took place on an unexpectedly mild, gray February [1957] morning in Washington, D.C., at St. John’s, the yellow-and-white Episcopal church across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. Nash, by then an atheist, balked at a Catholic ceremony. He would have been happy to get married in city hall. Alicia wanted an elegant, formal affair. It was a small wedding. There were no mathematicians or old school friends present, only immediate family. …

In April, two months later, Alicia and Nash threw a party to celebrate their marriage. They were living in a sublet apartment on the Upper East Side [of Manhattan in New York City], around the corner from Bloomingdale’s. About twenty people came, mostly mathematicians from Courant [Institute of Mathematical Sciences] and the Institute for Advanced Study and several of Alicia’s cousins, including Odette and Enrique. “They seemed very happy,” Enrique Larde later recalled. “It was a great apartment. …””

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

A wedding across from the White House, without mathematicians, and a new apartment around the corner from the upscale department store Bloomingdale’s – these were among the signs indicating, in my view, that Nash’s marriage to Alicia inspired his notion of “Emperor of Antarctica”.

Here is Nasar’s description of Nash’s “Emperor of Antarctica” expression in early 1959:

“Meanwhile, Adrian Albert, the chairman of the mathematics department at the University of Chicago, called Norman Levinson. What was Nash’s state of mind? he asked Levinson. Chicago had made an offer of a prestigious chair to Nash. Nash was scheduled to give a talk, and now he had received a very odd letter from Nash. It was a refusal of the Chicago offer. Nash had thanked Albert for his kind offer but said he would have to decline because he was scheduled to become Emperor of Antarctica. The letter, [Yale and Chicago mathematician Felix] Browder recalled in 1996, also contained references to Ted Martin’s stealing Nash’s ideas. The affair came to the attention of MIT president Julius Stratton, who, upon seeing a copy of Nash’s letter, is supposed to have said, “This is a very sick man.””

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

But I can see a logical scenario for this episode: rather than being “paranoid”, Nash felt Levinson and Martin were blocking his political activism, and so in this letter declining Chicago’s offer he also made an accusation about Martin, his boss, stealing his ideas; but Nash’s “Emperor of Antarctica” analogy offended the Chicago mathematicians who had made such a “kind offer” to him, so as a tit-for-tat response Chicago’s mathematics department chair, Adrian Albert, phoned Levinson to ask about Nash’s mental state, thus further inflaming the psychiatric machinations at MIT against Nash.

As I have pointed out, “Emperor of Antarctica” would have a meaning opposite that of queen and crown prince of the Arctic, sensible metaphors for future Chicagoans Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama – decades ago Nash quite possibly perceived Chicago’s incompatibility with his political outlook.

Very interestingly, my Ph.D. adviser Steve Smale’s Ph.D. adviser, Raoul Bott, a long-time John Nash acquaintance, pointed out that Nash liked to speak in mythical terms – such were not symptoms of mental illness:

“But none of this [Nash’s bizarre talks in late 1958, prior to advocating world peace] was especially alarming or suggested outright illness, just another stage in the evolution of Nash’s eccentricity. His conversation, as Raoul Bott put it, had “always mixed mathematics and myth.” His conversational style had always been a bit odd. He never seemed to know when to speak up or shut up or take part in ordinary give and take.”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

Perhaps Nash’s lack of interest in “ordinary give and take” preconditioned him for his interest in world peace. But from my reading of the situation, when Nash got into his political activism he found himself increasingly at odds with the political orientation of some of the others around him.

Back in 1953 Nash was already at MIT when Levinson and Martin were investigated for their communist history, but at the time Nash did not have as much interest in politics:

“… The graduate students and junior faculty in the department stood on the sidelines … Mrs. Levinson recalled. “The younger people – Nash’s group – didn’t want to be too friendly. They were scared. They distanced themselves.””

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

Now in 1958-1959, Nash felt agitated by “men in red neckties”:

“… He began, he recalled in 1996, to notice men in red neckties around the MIT campus. The men seemed to be signaling to him. “I got the impression that other people at MIT were wearing red neckties so I would notice them. As I became more and more delusional, not only persons at MIT but people in Boston wearing red neckties [would seem significant to me]. At some point, Nash concluded that the men in red ties were part of a definite pattern. “Also [there was some relation to] a crypto-communist party,” he said in 1996.”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

Nash’s metaphor was about “men in red neckties” appearing in a pattern and related to a crypto-communist party, that he began to notice around MIT and in Boston, that he likely had not noticed as much previously.

MIT’s mathematics program had traditionally had close connections to the Communist Party, such as to the Communist leader Earl Browder’s family who were investigated in 1953:

“The investigators had their eye on the three Browder boys – sons of former Communist Party head Earl Browder, who had all studied or were studying mathematics at MIT …”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

Also, as evidenced by what Rep. Richard Roudebush said in 1967, quoted earlier, that when he tried to get the National Science Foundation to stop research funding to Smale, “the full fury of the academic community fell in one swoop upon the NSF” – it was a sign the academia was sympathetic to Smale’s Communist-connected political activism.

With Nash’s link to his wife’s European-South American elite background and his type of pro-European world-peace activism, his political color would be “blue” as in blueblood, at odds with “red”. Nash was like a bull, fighting the Big Government while also goring at “red”.

When he was psychiatrically committed at McLean Hospital in Boston, Nash called himself “the prince of peace” and used the metaphor, “the left foot of God”, to describe his politics:

“The resident on duty that evening urged Nash to sign a “voluntary paper.” Nash refused. There was a great movement for world peace, he said, and he was its leader. He called himself “the prince of peace.” …

…

He told Arthur Mattuck that he believed that there was a conspiracy among military leaders to take over the world, that he was in charge of the takeover. Mattuck recalled, “He was very hostile. When I arrived, he said, ‘Have you come to spring me?’ He told me with guilty smile on his face that he secretly felt that he was the left foot of God and that God was walking on the earth. He was obsessed with secret numbers. ‘Do you know the secret number?’ he asked. He wanted to know if I was one of the the initiated.”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

I would interpret what Nash said as differentiating his politics from the “red”: Communists were atheists who did not believe in God’s existence; in contrast “the left foot of God”, while also on the political left, was a part of God’s body and instrument for “walking on the earth”.

Perhaps a tell-tale sign that Nash’s mental illness might be only borderline was his ability to stop his bizarreness and behave and talk very normally, when he wanted to get out the hospital in May 1959:

“Perhaps it was the Thorazine, perhaps the confinement, perhaps the overwhelming desire to regain his liberty, but Nash’s acute psychosis disappeared within a matter of weeks. On the ward, he behaved like a model patient … In his therapy sessions, he stopped talking about going to Europe to form a world government and no longer referred to himself as the leader of the peace movement. He made no threats of any kind, except divorce. He readily agreed, if asked, that he had written a great many crazy letters, had made a nuisance of himself to the university authorities, had otherwise behaved in bizarre ways. He denied emphatically that he was experiencing any hallucinations. The two young residents who were assigned to him – Egbert Mueller, a highly regarded German psychoanalyst, and Jacqueline Gauthier, a more junior French-Canadian – noted that his symptoms had all but “disappeared,” although privately they agreed that he was likely merely concealing them.

This was so. In his heart, Nash felt that he was a political prisoner and he was determined to escape his jailers as quickly as possible. …”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

Nash threatened to divorce his wife, and did so in the 1960s though Alicia continued to help him afterwards, and the two eventually remarried. In 1959 Nash was upset because Alicia Larde, while assisting his political activism, contacted the MIT psychiatrist and initiated his psychiatric committal:

“… The episode that convinced Alicia that she had no choice but to seek treatment for Nash occurred around Easter. Nash took off for Washington, D.C., in his Mercedes. He was, it appeared, trying to deliver letters to foreign governments by dropping them into the mail slots of embassies. This time Alicia went with him. Before they left, she telephoned her friend Emma and asked her to contact the university psychiatrist if they did not return within a week or so. Emma recalled in 1997 that Alicia was afraid Nash might harm her. Curiously, her concern, at least in Emma’s recollection, was less for herself than for Nash: “She wanted the world to know that Nash was mad. She was worried about Nash. She worried that if she came to harm that he’d be treated like a common criminal, so she wanted to be sure that everyone knew that he was insane.”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

Nasar’s book did not report any threat by Nash to physically harm his wife, but to leave her. The trouble at that point, in my view, was Nash’s physically going to various government and diplomatic places to distribute his political letters –  it could land him in criminal troubles.

Something similar happened to my political activism in 1992-1994.

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 6) — when law and justice reinforce the authorities”, March 25, 2012, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Nash’s colleague Paul Cohen – later in 1966 a co-recipient of the Fields Medal with Steve Smale – however, played up the physical danger:

“… Paul Cohen, however, recalled that “she was afraid of him.” …”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

Cohen was probably also involved in Nash’s psychiatric committal:

“When a stranger in a suit knocked on Paul Cohen’s office door to inquire whether he had seen Dr. Nash that afternoon, the man’s slightly unctuous, self-important manner made Cohen wonder whether this was the psychiatrist who was going to have Nash “locked up.” …

So when Nash showed up at Cohen’s door not very long afterward, seemingly oblivious to whatever machinations were underway, Cohen was more than a little surprised. Nash wanted to know if Cohen would like to go for a walk with him. Cohen agreed, and the two wandered around the MIT campus for an hour or more. As they walked, Nash spoke in a fitful monologue while Cohen listened, perplexed and uncomfortable. Occasionally Nash would stop, point at something, and whisper conspiratorially: “Look at that dog over there. He’s following us.” He frightened Cohen a bit by talking about Alicia in a way that made the younger man feel she might be in danger. After they parted, Cohen learned later, Nash was picked up and taken to McLean Hospital.”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

As described by Sylvia Nasar, Nash’s political activism at MIT started with a walk he invited graduate students Ramesh Cangolli and Alberto Galmarino to take with him, and ended right after a walk he invited colleague Paul Cohen to.

Psychologically, Nash’s failed claim in 1958 on solving a famed mathematical problem, the Riemann Hypothesis, and Cohen’s criticism of it may have given Nash additional stress:

“Sometime during the spring of 1958, Nash had confided to Eli Stein that he had “an idea of an idea” about how to solve the Riemann Hypothesis. That summer, he wrote letters to Albert E. Ingham, Atle Selberg, and other experts in number theory sketching his idea and asking their opinion. …

Even when a genius makes such an announcement, the rational response is skepticism. The Riemann Hypothesis is the holy grail of pure mathematics. …

…

… Stein’s impression of Nash during their conversations about the Riemann problem is interesting. “He was a little . . . on the wild side. There was something exaggerated about his actions. There was a flamboyance in the way he talked. Mathematicians are usually more careful about what they will assert to be true.” …

…

Cohen was flattered, even fascinated, by Nash’s interest, but he took special delight in rubbing Nash’s face in the disparity between the grandiose claims and reality. He was critical, to the point of viciousness, of Nash’s hubris. Later, Cohen would say, “Mathematically I didn’t interact with him. I didn’t feel I could talk to him about mathematics.”

But they did talk a good deal about Nash’s ideas on the Riemann Hypothesis. “Nash thought he could work on any problem he wanted,” said Cohen in a tone of mild outrage. “… What he was trying to do, you couldn’t do. I would have been very unsympathetic to Nash’s notion. The Riemann Hypothesis can’t be solved as stated. He came by with this letter. But any expert would have said these ideas are naive. What I admired is the enormous self-confidence to even conjecture. If he’s right, this guy’s intuition is in the stratosphere. But it turned out to be just another wrong idea.

A year later, after he had been hospitalized, some blamed disappointed love and the intense rivalry with a younger man for Nash’s breakdown. Ironically, Cohen’s career wound up mirroring Nash’s. After his great success, he turned to the Riemann Hypothesis and physics. …”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

In 1959 MIT’s psychiatric measures ended John Nash’s dream of starting a world-peace movement there.

Then in March-April 1963, already a “paranoid schizophrenic” and hanging around Princeton, Nash refused an initiative by mathematicians in the American Mathematical Society to get him to Michigan for 2 years of treatment and work, and thus missed the March 1965 start of the anti-Vietnam War movement there – as quoted earlier, Nash’s former MIT boss Ted Martin played an active role in trying to get Nash to Michigan in this manner.

What did Nash do then, politically, if anything, during the later exciting times of anti-war protest actions on university campuses across the U.S.?

There were other psychiatric committals, intermittently. Then from mid-1965 to mid-1967 Nash was back in Boston, continuing to read the messages The New York Times supposedly coded for him, taking part in politics that way:

“Weekdays, when he commuted to Waltham in a ratty old Nash Rambler convertible purchased on his arrival in Boston, were better. He was almost enjoying being at Brandeis. …

…

… He had seen Norman Levinson, who… had let Nash know that he would be paying Nash’s salary with National Science Foundation and Navy grants, and that he hoped Nash would be able to pursue his own research ideas, as before. …

He started to see a thirty-three-year-old psychiatrist, Pattison Esmiol. An affable Coloradan with a medical degree from Harvard, Esmiol had just left the Navy to open a private practice in Brookline. …

Nash was seeing [former girlfriend] Eleanor [Stier] and [son] John David …

…

[Former MIT math student Al] Vasquez, who had an apartment near Nash’s, was running into Nash wandering around Harvard Square the way he later wandered around Princeton:

He was concerned with the politics of Mao Tse-tung, that sort of thing. In Harvard Square, he was talking about a committee that was communicating with foreign governments who manipulated the news in The New York Times in order to send messages to him. He had this idea that with this information he could find out how negotiations between various powers were going.

Nash was still attending the Harvard colloquium on Thursdays. “He was very peculiar,” Vasquez recalled. “He believed that there were magic numbers, dangerous numbers. He was saving the world.””

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

So while anti-war protesters in the U.S. and around the world believed they were out there saving the world from the deadly Vietnam War and other dangers, John Nash believed he was saving the world in his peculiar, secretive way.

I note that Nash’s former MIT senior colleague Norman Levinson, despite a Communist past, held both NSF and Navy grants in this Vietnam War era, and that in contrast, divorced and his Mercedes no more, Nash received a research salary from Levinson while taking counselling by a former Navy psychiatrist.

What really troubles me, in reviewing this history of peace and anti-war politics, is that before a war’s occurrence peace activism like Nash’s was sabotaged and aborted, presumably due to its association with the old social order, and yet peaceful fundamental changes were not an option, but war and anti-war politics to counterbalance the war. This was a course of history fraught with destruction, mass deaths, misery and, at the end, a fortified and re-enforced gulag standing tall over the ruins.

But that would be a discourse into the realm of war and politics, not just peace and education.

The career stages of John Nash and Steve Smale’s Ph.D. adviser Raoul Bott were closely matched, offering a glimpse into how much Nash’s lack of participation in the Michigan-affiliated grassroots political activities may have been a serious handicap for his attempts to launch his political activism.

In the mid-late 1940s both Nash and Bott were at Carnegie Institute of Technology, today’s Carnegie Mellon University:

“… Among the scholarship recipients who entered Carnegie in 1945 were talented youngsters like Andy Warhol, the artist, as well as a group of young men who would eventually, like Nash, shun engineering for science and mathematics.

…

Even as he struggled in the laboratory, Nash was already discovering a brilliant group of newcomers to Carnegie. By his sophomore year, [Robert] Doherty’s program of upgrading the theoretical sciences had brought to Carnegie John Synge, nephew of the Irish playwright John Millington Synge, who became head of the mathematics department. … he was a man of great charm who attracted younger scholars like Richard Duffin, Raoul Bott, and Alexander Weinstein, a European émigré whom Einstein had once invited to become a collaborator. When Albert Tucker, a Princeton topologist who did pathbreaking work in operations research, came to Carnegie to lecture that year, he was so impressed with the depth of mathematical talent at Carnegie that he confessed that he felt as if he were “bringing coals to Newcastle.”

From the start, Nash dazzled his mathematics professors, one of them called him “a young Gauss”. …”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

Nash was a Carnegie undergraduate when Bott, a Canadian originally from Hungary and Slovakia in Europe, was a Carnegie Ph.D. student. Then from 1948 to 1951 Nash was a Princeton Ph.D. student, while from 1949 to 1951 Bott was a scholar at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, where Albert Einstein and John von Neumann were professors.

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster; and, “Raoul Bott 1923-2005”, by Sir Michael Atiyah, U.S. National Academy of Sciences)

Then the Michigan factor came in.

In 1951, Bott became a faculty member at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where his teaching and research produced Steve Smale, a future Fields Medalist; also in 1951, Nash became an MIT faculty member.

In 1959, after his failed political-activism attempt and psychiatric committal, Nash resigned from MIT; a year later in 1960, Bott became a professor at Harvard University, permanently until his death in 2005.

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster; and, Sir Michael Atiyah, U.S. National Academy of Sciences)

Harvard, Bott’s permanent home after Nash lost one, was always Nash’s aspiration, whereas Michigan was low on Nash’s list:

“By the spring of 1948 – in what would have been his junior year at Carnegie – Nash had been accepted to Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, and Michigan, the four top graduate mathematics programs in the country. Getting into one of these was virtually a prerequisite for eventually landing a good academic appointment.

Harvard was his first choice. Nash told everyone that he believed that Harvard had the best mathematics faculty. Harvard’s cachet and social status appealed to him. As a university, Harvard had a national reputation, while Chicago and Princeton, with its largely European faculty, did not. Harvard was, to his mind, simply number one, and the prospect of becoming a Harvard man seemed terribly attractive.

The trouble was that Harvard was offering slightly less money than Princeton. Certain that Harvard’s comparative stinginess was the consequence of his less-than-stellar performance in the Putnam competition, Nash decided that Harvard didn’t really want him. He responded to the rebuff by refusing to go there. Fifty years later, in his Nobel autobiography Harvard’s lukewarm attitude toward him seems still to have stung: “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.”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

So Nash’s lifelong interest in Harvard has been unfulfilled, whereas his Princeton experience has been largely satisfactory because, even though he didn’t get a permanent professorship there, his Princeton Ph.D. thesis eventually led to the greatest award, the Nobel Prize.

In comparison, Chicago got some passing thought while Michigan, the only public university among the four that had accepted him for graduate study, was barely mentioned when Nash didn’t have to.

The irony is that Raoul Bott who had spent 9 years at the University of Michigan became an Harvard professor for some 45 years, whereas Nash who refused to go to Chicago or Michigan never got anything permanent after the MIT fallout, instead working at various research or visiting positions. Even after he became a Nobel Prize winner Nash’s title at Princeton has been “senior research mathematician”.

(“A ‘long awaited recognition’: Nash receives Abel Prize for revered work in mathematics”, by Morgan Kelly, March 26, 2015, News at Princeton)

At a political level of comparison, Bott’s Michigan Ph.D. student Steve Smale went on to become both a leading mathematician and an anti-war movement leader, whereas Nash’s political activism went into oblivion and presently has not been acknowledged as anything but eccentricity and mental illness.

So I must wonder if, at a hidden level, Nash’s lack of grassroots “red”-association and his refusal to cultivate such via the University of Michigan, or even via the University of Chicago, meant not only lack of support for his political activism but also hidden blockage against it.

While Raoul Bott as a link highlighted the Nash-Smale contrast in political activism, another mathematician, Shiing-shen Chern, was also an important, albeit more subtle, link between Nash and others.

As in this Part’s first quote, from my first blog article, in 1958-1959 when the University of Chicago’s mathematics department made a “prestigious chair” offer to Nash, Shiing-shen Chern was a professor there.

Among the early generation of modern mathematicians in China, in the 1930s  Chern studied in Hamburg, Germany, and Paris, France, and was a scholar at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study in 1943-1945, before returning to China to lead the build-up of mathematical research there. Then, Chern and his family left China in 1948 prior to the Communist takeover:

“Chern returned to China in the spring of 1946. The Chinese government had just decided to set up an Institute of Mathematics as part of Academia Sinica. Lifu Jiang was designated chairman of the organizing committee, and he in turn appointed Chern as one of the committee members. … In 1948 the Institute moved to Nanjing, and Academia Sinica elected eighty-one charter members, Chern being the youngest of these.

Chern was so involved in his research and with the training of students that he paid scant attention to the civil war that was engulfing China. One day however, he received a telegram from J. Robert Oppenheimer, then Director of the Institute for Advanced Study, saying “If there is anything we can do to facilitate your coming to this country please let us know.” Chern went to read the English language newspapers and, realizing that Nanjing would soon become embroiled in the turmoil that was rapidly overtaking the country, he decided to move the whole family to America. Shortly before leaving China he was also offered a position at the Tata Institute in Bombay. The Cherns left from Shanghai on December 31, 1948, and spent the Spring Semester at the Institute in Princeton.”

(“The Life and Mathematics of Shiing-Shen Chern”, by Richard S. Palais and Chuu-Lian Terng, in S. Y. Cheng, G. Tian and Peter Li, eds., A Mathematician and His Mathematical Work: Selected Papers of S.S. Chern, 1996, World Scientific)

From 1949 on Chern was a professor at the University of Chicago. In 1958, he was a strong backer of the “prestigious chair” offer to Nash:

“… Chicago had gone a long time without making any senior hires, even after Andre Weil had left for the Institute for Advanced Study. Now the math department had a new chairman, Adrian Albert, and some cash. Albert was looking at a young Harvard professor, John Thompson, who had done brilliant work in group theory, and also at Nash, who had a number of strong supporters in the department, including Shiing-shen Chern.”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

But Nash was “scheduled to become Emperor of Antarctica” and in early 1959 declined the Chicago offer.

In 1960, Chern moved to UC Berkeley. When I was Steve Smale’s Ph.D. student in the 1980s, Chern liked to say that it was he who had recruited Smale to Berkeley. Smale’s UC Berkeley website biography indicates he was an instructor at Chicago from 1956 to 1958, was at IAS in Princeton 1958-1960, and became a UC Berkeley associate professor in 1960. They had some collaborations, including organizing research activities in geometry.

(Richard S. Palais and Chuu-Lian Terng, in S. Y. Cheng, G. Tian and Peter Li, eds., 1996, World Scientific; Department of Mathematics, University of California, Berkeley; and, Shiing-Shen Chern and Stephen Smale, eds., Global Analysis, 1970, American Mathematical Society)

Before moving to Berkeley, Chern was in Paris during the winter of1959-1960, where he would attend a St. Etienne’s Day party given by Nash and Alicia.

Nash and Alicia had gone to Europe not long after his discharge from McLean Hospital in Boston:

“On May 20, when Alicia’s labor began, Nash was still in McLean …

Alicia gave birth to a baby boy that night. …

…

… They left their Mercedes, its trunk full of old issues of The New York Times, in the Institute parking lot in Princeton. Nash wished to bequeath both car and newspapers to Hassler Whitney, the mathematician whom he most admired. They left their baby – not yet named and therefore referred to as Baby Epsilon, a little mathematical joke – behind as well. Alicia’s mother had already taken the infant home with her to Washington. Mrs. Lardes, they had agreed, would join them in Paris with the baby as soon as they were settled.

…

Shortly after Independence Day, Nash and Alicia left from New York harbor on the Queen Mary… They watched the pier, then the skyline, then the Statue of Liberty move away from them as they sailed slowly toward the open sea. …”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

Nash intended to renounce his American citizenship in Europe and become a “world citizen”.

He went to Paris, tried to turn in his U.S. passport in Luxemburg, and finally decided to do it in Geneva, Switzerland, former site of the League of Nations, because of its reputation as “the city of refugees”:

“Ideas of world government, and the related concept of world citizenship, were at their heyday during Nash’s Princeton graduate school days … Founded after the collapse of the League of Nations in the 1930s, the one-world movement exploded into the national consciousness within a few years of the end of World War II. Princeton was a center of that movement, largely because of the presence of physicists and mathematicians – notably Albert Einstein and John von Neumann – who acted as midwives to the nuclear age. …

However, the one-worlder who fired Nash’s imagination was a loner like himself, the Abbie Hoffman of the one-world movement. In 1948, Garry Davis, a leather-jacketed World War II bomber pilot, Broadway actor, and son of society band leader Meyer Davis, had walked into the American embassy in Paris, turned in his U.S. passport, and renounced his American citizenship. He then tried to get the United Nations to declare him “the first citizen of the world.” Davis, “sick and tired of war and rumors of war,” wished to start a world government. …

Nash intended to follow in Davis’s footsteps. …

…

Nash’s desire to go to Geneva was based, he later said, on his having heard that Geneva was “the city of refugees.” … Geneva had become the site of the ill-fated League of Nations and was a major international banking center. …”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

But Nash failed his attempt to renounce his U.S. citizenship or to become a refugee in Switzerland, and was deported to Paris in December 1959:

“Nash appealed to many authorities. Yet he seemed unable to make much progress. The American consulate, he discovered, was not prepared to accept his passport or to allow him to take the oath of renunciation. …

The U.N. High Commission for Refugees, on which he pinned his hopes, sent him away. It appeared that the commission, the promising name notwithstanding, had rules that precluded cases like this. One could claim refugee status only in connection with “events occurring in Europe before 1 January 1951” and “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion…” The officials of the commission suggested he contact the Swiss police.

…

In November, the Geneva authorities were informed that Nash was, for all practical purposes, far beyond the American draft age and that he was in no way obliged to do defense-related research. Moreover, Nash had committed none of the acts that would provoke the American government to strip him of his citizenship. …

…

… in September or October, in a fit of desperation, Nash destroyed or threw away his passport. …

…

… According to a telegram, dated December 16, from the American consul in Geneva, Henry S. Villard, to Secretary of State Christian A. Herter, the Swiss authorities had issued a deportation order naming Nash as an “undesirable alien” on December 11. …

…

Even in jail, Nash refused to return to the United States…

At this point, Alicia agreed to take Nash back to Paris with her where they had, after all, an apartment. The consul general agreed to issue Alicia a new passport that included Nash. … The police escorted Nash to the train station. …”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

A few months later in March 1960, Nash also went to East Germany and probably also tried to apply for asylum in the Soviet Union:

“Nash then managed a rather extraordinary feat. In early March, he traveled, alone and without passport, to East Germany. Hard as it is to believe that an American without documents could get into the DDR in 1960, Nash confirmed in 1995 that he had indeed traveled there, explaining that in his “time of irrational thinking” he had gone “places where you didn’t heed an American passport.” What actually must have happened, given the tremendously tight security at the border at the time, was that Nash applied to the DDR for asylum and was then permitted by the authorities to enter the country until the request was decided. … According to a card he sent Martha and Virginia, he was able … to attend a famous propaganda event … the Leipzig industrial world fair, which was the Iron Curtain’s answer to the Brussels world fair. Later, mathematicians in America would hear from [U.S. State Department deputy science adviser Larkin] Farinholt that “Nash tried to defect to the Russians” but that the Russians had refused to have anything to do with him. …”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

It was in-between his Western Europe and Eastern Europe asylum attempts when Nash and Alicia celebrated Christmas 1959 in their Paris apartment and held a St. Etienne’s Day party for a few mathematicians including Shiing-shen Chern, and Alexander Grothendieck:

“Nash and Alicia celebrated Christmas at 49 Avenue de la Republique. It was, as Nash was to write to Virginia, “interesting.” Alicia’s mother was there and so was the eight-month-old [son] John Charles. There was a Christmas tree, perhaps the first one that the Nashes had ever had, decorated in the German manner with tiny lady apples and red wax candles. …

On St. Etienne’s Day, the day after Christmas, Alicia gave a party attended by several mathematicians, American as well as French. Shiing-shen Chern, a mathematician who had met Nash at the University of Chicago and was in Paris for the semester, came. He recalled “an interesting idea” that Nash had then, namely that four cities in Europe constituted the vertices of a square. The most striking visitor at 49 Avenue de la Republique, however, was Alexandre Grothendieck, a brilliant, charismatic, highly eccentric young algebraic geometer who wore his head shaved, affected traditional Russian peasant dress, and held strong pacifist views. Grothendieck had just taken a chair at the new French mathematics center, the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques. and would win a Fields Medal in 1966. In the early 1970s, he founded a survivalist organization, dropped out of academia altogether, and became a virtual recluse … Grothendieck was a frequent visitor at the Nashes’ apartment …”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

I wonder which European cities form the 4 corners of a square as Nash had noticed and Chern later recalled. Some of the other numbers, perhaps like “magic numbers” Nash was interested in, were intriguing.

Chern who had escaped Communist takeover of China was a guest. Nash’s Paris apartment was at 49 Avenue de la Republique; the Chinese communists had established the People’s Republic of China in 1949 but what it replaced had already been the Republic of China – so perhaps it wasn’t too unusual.

The party was held on St. Etienne’s Day, a very appropriate day to invite friends over after Christmas, in memory of the first Christian martyr in history, St. Etienne, or St. Stephen. In North America it is called the Boxing Day.

But there was something else about St. Etienne’s Day I have noted, quoted earlier:

“… ten years later by 1969 when the Vietnam War was in full force and the St. Stephen’s Day-born American leftist William Ayers was founding the militant-resistance organization Weather Underground to engage in a series of high-profile, violent bombings in the United States for radical causes, John Nash’s thoughts by then could have been viewed as a borderline, nonviolent precursor to these later actions of Ayers and his associates…”

(Part 2, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In fact, both William Ayers, 10 years later the leader of Weather Underground, the most violent organization of the anti-Vietnam War movement, and Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung), the founding leader of Communist China, had their birthdays on St. Etienne’s Day.

Moreover, both Ayers and Mao showed the character of advocating socialist redistribution of wealth but not applying it to their well-to-do families – something about Mao as a young revolutionary I discussed in earlier blog posts.

(“Power, avengement, ideological cementation — Mao Zedong’s class politics in great forward leaps, tactical concessions”, April 6, 2015, Feng Gao’s Posts – Rites of Spring)

Later in 1962, Nash likely made an attempt to approach Communist China like he had done in 1960 with East Germany and the Soviet Union:

“Nash, meanwhile, went back to London. What drew him to London is not clear, since his original plan had been, presumably, to spend the summer, except for the [1962 international] congress [of mathematicians] in Stockholm, as well as the following academic year, in Paris. …

[Mathematician John] Danskin recalled that someone went looking for Nash and finally found him hanging around the Chinese embassy in London. …

…

Nash, who felt that he should have been one of those honored, did not, however, go to Stockholm. He went to Geneva instead, returning to the Hotel Alba where he had spent his final week in December 1959 and writing in French to Martha … He drew an identity card with Chinese characters labeled “Des Secrets.” …

When Nash returned to Princeton at the end of summer 1962, he was extremely ill. A postcard addressed to Mao Tse-tung c/o Fine Hall, Princeton, New Jersey, arrived in the mathematics department. Nash had written only a cryptic remark in French about triple tangent planes.”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

The great international lengths to which John Nash went to register his anger about the abortion, by forced psychiatric measures in the United States, of his world-peace and world-government activism were simply amazing.

Nash’s French friend Alexander Grothendieck, Smale’s 1966 Fields Medal co-recipient as was Nash’s former MIT colleague Paul Cohen, was one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century:

“He is widely credited for advances that made possible long-sought proofs for befuddling problems, including Fermat’s Last Theorem…

… He was instrumental in proving an especially thorny set of hypotheses known as the Weil conjectures. But characteristically he did not attack the problem directly. Instead, he built a superstructure of theory around the problem. The solution then emerged easily and naturally, in a way that made mathematicians see how the conjectures had to be true.”

(“Alexander Grothendieck, Math Enigma, Dies at 86”, by Bruce Weber and Julie Rehmeyer, November 14, 2014, The New York Times)

Nash was apparently intrigued by Grothendieck in Europe in 1959-1960 while trying unsuccessfully to renounce his U.S. citizenship and seek asylum. In 1964, Nash took another trip on the Queen Mary to Europe after Grothendieck offered him a one-year position in Paris, skipping a one-year position Princeton had offered him; but when Nash got to Paris, Grothendieck was nowhere to be seen; Nash visited Rome and Paris, and eventually returned to the U.S. on the Queen Mary:

“[Princeton mathematics department chair John] Milnor decided to offer Nash a one-year post as research mathematician and lecturer. …

…

Nash had apparently been in touch with Grothendieck once more. Grothendieck evidently responded with an invitation to the IHES for the following year. …

… He sailed on the Queen Mary, stopped briefly in London, and went to Paris. There he tried to get in touch with Grothendieck, who evidently wasn’t in town. … Nash flew to Rome. He was, as he later said, thinking of himself as a “great but secret religious figure.” … as he later said, he visited “the Forum and the catacombs but avoided the Vatican.” …

…

… Finally, on September 15, Tucker sent a terse note to Dean Brown, canceling the appointment and saying that Nash had gone to the University of Paris.

Nash hung around Paris a few more weeks until he finally gave up. In mid-September, he wrote to Virginia from Paris that he would be returning on the Queen Mary on the twenty-fourth, adding a postscript: “Situation looks dismal.””

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

A “great but secret religious figure” who visited the Forum and the catacombs in Rome but not the Vatican – could that not be related to “the left foot of God”?

From December 1964 to mid-July 1965 Nash was in another psychiatric committal at the Carrier Clinic near Princeton – where he was committed when the anti-war movement began in Michigan in March 1965.

Grothendieck, son of a Russian Jew who had perished in the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942, was a “pacifist” with his own political activism. He went farther than Smale in opposing both the Soviet Union’s mistreatment of intellectuals and the U.S.’s role in the Vietnam War, and later resigned his prestigious chair at Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques to protest military funding:

“His background and early life were tangled and harrowing. His father, whose name is usually reported as Alexander Schapiro, was a Jewish anarchist who fought against the Russian czarist government. He was captured by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution and eventually escaped to Western Europe. Along the way he lost an arm.

…

Young Alexander’s parents left Germany as the Nazis took power — they participated in the Spanish Civil War — leaving him in the care of foster parents in Hamburg, where he first went to school. In 1939, he reunited with his mother and father in France, but his father was arrested, sent to an internment camp at Le Vernet and eventually moved to Auschwitz, where he died in 1942.

……

Mr. Grothendieck had long held pacifist views, and by the late 1960s he had also become consumed by environmentalism. In 1966, he refused to travel to Moscow to receive the Fields Medal as a protest against the imprisonment of Soviet writers. He traveled to Hanoi at the height of the Vietnam War and lectured in Paris about the trip. He resigned from IHES, at least in part because some of its funding came from the French Defense Ministry, though he was also feuding with the institute’s founder. And he helped found an organization, Survivre, that promoted environmental activism and opposed the proliferation of nuclear weapons. He studied Buddhism and mysticism.”

(Bruce Weber and Julie Rehmeyer, November 14, 2014, The New York Times)

Grothendieck recorded two interesting coincidences in his 1967 visit to the North Vietnamese capital Hanoi to give mathematical lectures there: the Minister of Higher Education and Technology, Ta Quang Buu, a former Defense Minister and signer of the 1954 Geneva Accord, was a mathematician and attended his lectures; and a U.S. warplane dropped a “delayed-action cluster bomb” in the courtyard of the Hanoi Polytechnic Institute, resulting in the first two U.S. air-raid fatalities of math instructors in higher or technical education:

“… The first serious bombardments had been anticipated; they took place on Friday 17 November, two days before we left for the countryside. Three times my talk was interrupted by alarms, during which we took refuge in shelters. Each alert lasted about ten minutes. …

During one of the air raids that Friday morning a delayed-action cluster bomb fell right in the courtyard of the Hanoi Polytechnic Institute, and (after the alert was over) it killed two mathematics instructors at the Institute. Ta Quang Buu, who is a mathematician as well as the Minister of Higher Education and Technology (and who attended the lectures that I gave while in Hanoi), was discreetly informed of this during the lecture. He left at once; the rest of the audience continued to follow the lecture while waiting for the next alert. … This seems to have been the first time since the escalation that mathematics instructors in higher or technical education were killed.”

(“Mathematical Life in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam”, by A. Grothendieck, December 20, 1967, University of Paris, website of Neal Koblitz, Department of Mathematics, University of Washington)

In a March 2011 blog post I mentioned my first UC Berkeley roommate “Li”, a senior mathematics graduate student whose help was considerable to me, that he once delivered a book to a Chinese writer near Stanford not long before the latter was assassinated:

“At Berkeley I became the latest roommate of a senior Math graduate student, “Li”, one of the most active Chinese graduate students on campus, who would give me a considerable amount of help getting my studies on track.

…

… I mentioned an episode in 1984 when a Taiwanese visiting professor of Philosophy was about to go to teach at Beijing University, had “Li” deliver his new book to a Taiwanese author living across the San Francisco Bay not far from Stanford, and then not long after that the other author, Henry Liu … who had recently written an unauthorized biography of Chiang Ching-kuo, president of the government in Taiwan and son of Chiang Kai-shek, was murdered at his home.”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 3) – when violence and motive are subtle and pervasive”, March 29, 2011, Feng Gao’s Blog – Reflections on Events of Interest)

Kezheng Li specialized in algebraic geometry, and Grothendieck was revered by him and by his former Chinese graduate school roommate Xiao Gang (Gang XIAO) – respectively the second and the first graduate student admitted in China after the Cultural Revolution, by the University of Science and Technology of China in 1977, among a small elite selection ahead of the first national graduate school entrance exam in 1978.

Kezheng liked to talk about Grothendieck’s quitting mathematics to live in rural communes:

“… In more than one rural commune, he practiced an eccentric Buddhism. … Yet Grothendieck’s alternative lifestyle, which became increasingly hermit-like, managed to shock many mathematicians…”

(“The Shock Tactics of Alexander Grothendieck”, by Karen Karin Rosenberg, June 7, 2015, Jewish Currents)

In reality, after quitting his professorship at IHES in protest of military funding the institute received, Grothendieck tried but failed to get a permanent position at another top research institution, before turning his back on the high-level mathematical research community:

“After leaving the IHES, Grothendieck tried but failed to get a post at the Collège de France in Paris. Instead, in 1973, he accepted a professorship at Montpellier University, where he mainly taught elementary subjects such as linear algebra and calculus. He became estranged from the high-level mathematical community.”

(“Alexander Grothendieck – obituary”, November 14, 2014, The Telegraph)

But unlike Nash who tried to get asylum in East Germany and the Soviet Union, and possibly China, Grothendieck practiced Buddhism and mysticism in his communes – not the kind as in the Communist Eastern Bloc countries.

It was 36 years since his failed foray into political activism before Nash was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. In his 1994 Nobel autobiography Nash made only one mention of politics, describing it as “a hopeless waste of intellectual effort”:

“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. …”

(“John F. Nash Jr. – Biographical”, 1994, Nobelprize.org)

“Politically-oriented thinking” is not “rationally” “in the style that is characteristic of scientists” – such a sad conclusion!

Not long before that, in 1990 Steve Smale also re-examined his “brief membership” in the Communist Party, in a speech in Smalefest, a conference celebrating his 60th birthday, to which I also contributed an article – by the arrangement of Lenore Blum, a research collaborator of Steve’s, I was visiting International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley at the time.

That day, or the day before, was when I first learned that Smale had been a Communist Party member and was going to address the issue in his speech.

Smale said:

“Although there were some strains and some signs of my independence, I had accepted the basic doctrines of the Communist Party and defended them. Today, when I ask myself how I could have acted so foolishly, it is not difficult to find an answer.

…

Consider my frame of reference at that time. I was sufficiently skeptical of the country’s institutions to the point that I couldn’t accept the negative newspaper reports about the Soviet Union. I so believed in the goal of a utopian society that brutal means to achieve it could be justified. I was unsure of myself on social grounds, and the developing social network of leftists around me gave me security. Then, these were the times of McCarthyism, the Rosenberg executions, the Korean War hysteria; the CP was the main group giving unqualified resistance to these forces.”

(“Some Autobiographical Notes”, by Steve Smale, in Morris W. Hirsch, Jerrold E. Marsden and Michael Shub, eds., From Topology to Computation: Proceedings of the Smalefest, 1993, Springer-Verlag)

So to Steve Smale, it had been more a matter of the availability of a political and social group meeting his particular senses of disillusionment, idealism and activism, than belief in Communism. He came to criticise his past ‘foolishness’ in accepting the Communist Party doctrines, but unlike John Nash he did not reject “politically-oriented thinking”.

Jerry Rubin, the former Berkeley graduate student co-chairing the Vietnam Day Committee with Smale in 1965 after visiting Cuba in 1964, also made a huge turn in political direction by the 1980s – not to reject his past but to embrace capitalism as a way of making social changes.

Instead of leading the Yippies, the anti-war Youth International Party founded by him and Abbie Hoffman, Rubin inspired the popular 1980s’ name Yuppies:

““Perhaps you remember me from the ’60s,” he said sarcastically to the audience which was mostly students who were too young during his heyday to understand what he was doing. “I was known and not wanted in many states.”

Today, however, Rubin said he never goes “anywhere without my American Express card.”

Rubin took credit for being an unwitting founder of the so-called yuppie society.

“In the ’60s,” he said, “we thought everything was easy. But in the ’80s, we realize life is hard work. You may not like it . . . but we’re in the decade of the Young Urban Professional.”

The yuppie generation, which he defined as the 75 million Americans born between 1945-65, is unique because it is the post-World War II, television-age, information-society generation. And it will use its unique characteristics to lead an entrepreneurial revolution, Rubin said.

Rubin said it was yuppie entrepreneurial spirit that led him to found his own business networking service in New York. Rubin was featured in a Bob Greene column a few years ago in which Greene coined the term “yuppie,” he said.

Rubin now unabashedly says he seeks to make money, because “the people with money control this country.”

He said he used to think commuism was the way to solve the world’s problems, by eliminating social classes. Now, Rubin said capitalism will lead to a new world.

That also was Rubin’s reasoning for criticizing the Reagan administration’s trade embargo of Nicaragua, officially imposed yesterday. He suggested that rather than subduing Nicaragua, and, for that matter, Cuba and other “enemies,” through militarism, the United States should open relations, exchange representatives and bring American culture to those countries.

“Can a democracy be an occupying army?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”

Speaking rapidly and animatedly, he asserted that America’s closer ties with the People’s Republic of China is the reason for greater support for America in Southeast Asia than the support the country had at any time during the Vietnam conflict.

“The removal of military power,” Rubin said, “makes you stronger.”

He also ventured a prediction that the United States and the Soviet Union will be friendly toward each other in 10 years as yuppies take power here and a new generation grows up in the Soviet Union.

…

Yuppies also will maintain a spirit of anti-nuclear war, anti-intervention, pro-economic growth and pro-cultural pluralism.

He also offered these opinions:

…

– “I’m a disappointed ex-Communist.”

– The day he was served with an FBI subpoena to testify before a subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives, at which he appeared in a Colonial-style costume, representing the early American revolutionary spirit, “was one of the happiest days of my life.””

(“From Chicago 7 To Fortune 500 Jerry Rubin Embraces Capitalism As The Way To A New World”, by Tim Darragh, May 2, 1095, The Morning Call)

Rubin’s business networking events in New York, mentioned in his Lehigh University lecture quoted above, were like his anti-war protests, i.e., they were big and they broke traditions – the largest private network in the City of New York, with a list of 67,000 people, and weekly parties of 5,000 at the Palladium nightclub:

““NETWORKING” is not new, but for generations it has been confined to the exclusive enclaves of private men’s clubs and golf courses. Recently, however, groups that would never have fit into the old-boy network – young men and women who are on their way up, or hope to be – have begun setting up their own networks to swap cards and information. …

These days the place is the Palladium, the splashy new club on East 14th Street, and the occasion, every Tuesday evening, is a networking party organized by Jerry Rubin, the 1960’s Yippie turned 1980’s Yuppie and entrepreneur. Five years ago Mr. Rubin began holding networking salons in his home. Later he shifted to Studio 54. Then Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, Studio 54’s creators, opened the Palladium, and Jerry and Mimi Rubin’s weekly networking party followed.

…

… “I don’t like to use the word, but every Yuppie in New York comes,” he added. So have a number of media celebrities, as special guests – they have included the film producer David Brown; the Good Housekeeping editor, John Mack Carter; the publisher Malcolm Forbes – as well as a handful of corporations that want to sell their services to a ready-made market.

The Palladium holds 3,500 people but, by Mr. Rubin’s tally, upward of 5,000 guests come and go in the course of a networking evening. He has a business card for each of them. “We have 67,000 people on computer, and no duplicates,” said Barry Segal, who helps run the networking evenings. “It’s the largest private club in New York.””

(“NEW YORKERS & CO.; BUSY NIGHT OUT, FOR ‘NETWORKING’”, by Sandra Salmans, September 17, 1985, The New York Times)

Rubin had parted with his anti-war partner and co-leader of the Yippies, Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman had gone underground in the 1970s due to a cocaine possession charge, disguised himself through plastic surgery and continued with other protest activities; after reappearing and settling his criminal-law problem, Hoffman resumed high-profile protest activity and was once arrested in 1986 with Amy Carter, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter’s daughter, for protesting against the CIA:

“As a fugitive, Hoffman said he had disguised himself as “Barry Freed,” a freelance TV writer and had become an environmental activist in the successful Save the River Campaign to keep the St. Lawrence River from being dredged. He also said he testified before a congressional panel headed by Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan in that role. In 1979, as Barry Freed, he was appointed to a federal commission.

…

In recent years he still showed flashes of his old activism. He led environmentalist protests against plans to divert water from the Delaware river to cool a nuclear power plant and in the fall of 1986, he and 60 other demonstrators, including Amy Carter, the former president’s daughter, were arrested for a protest of CIA recruitment at the University of Massachusetts. He was later acquitted on the charge.

…

He received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., in 1959 and got his master’s degree in graduate school at University of California at Berkeley in 1960.”

(“Abbie Hoffman, 1960’s Radical, Discovered Dead”, by Ray Lynch, April 13, 1989, Sun Sentinel)

Over their opposite directions, Rubin and Hoffman engaged in a series of “Yippie-versus-Yuppie” debates:

“In the 1980s much of the radical counterculture … was either forced underground or forced to assimilate into Ronald Reagan’s America. There is no greater symbol of the insanity of that period than the “Yippie vs. Yuppie” debate tour of Yippie co-founders Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.

…

Rubin became enchanted with Reaganomics and the idea of Yuppie. Hoffman called him a “sellout,” but Rubin rebuffed him, claiming he had “joined America rather than fighting against it” and that, “in order to be a part of the solution, rather than part of the problem, we have to work from within.” Rubin believed activism was dead, that it had become negative and cynical and fraught with letdowns. He charged that “abuse of drugs, sex, and private property” had made the counterculture “a scary society in itself.” …”

(Charles Shaw, Exile Nation: Drugs, Prisons, Politics, and Spirituality, May 2012, Soft Skull Press)

In April 1989, Hoffman suddenly died at only 52, in what was ruled a drug overdose suicide:

““’He was really uncomfortable with becoming middle aged and facing old age without seeing significant social change,” Mr. Hayden said in a telephone interview last night.

“He was a perennial youth, a juvenile delinquent with gray hair,” Mr. Hayden added. “I have to think that perturbed him a lot. He was always trying to re-create the 60’s and was deeply dismayed he was becoming a prophet in the wilderness of the 80’s.”

…

But a brother, Jack Hoffman, said he believed Mr. Hoffman had not stopped fighting and had not committed suicide.

“Abbie, as many of you know, was somewhat careless with pills, and we always warned him about this kind of thing,” the brother said, according to The Associated Press.

The coroner, though, reported finding the residue of about 150 pills and alcohol in Mr. Hoffman’s system.

He said in a telephone interview later in the day: “There is no way to take that amount of phenobarbital without intent. It was intentional and self-inflicted.”

…

Mr. Hoffman’s body was discovered last Wednesday night by his friend and landlord, Michael Waldron. …

…

Mr. Waldron said Mr. Hoffman had spent the past year and a half writing and giving speeches. He often practiced the speeches by shouting out the window to the pair of llamas,” Mr. Waldron recalled.

“He’d be chanting and screaming, and the llamas were spellbound,” he said. “They’d follow him anywhere.””

(“Abbie Hoffman Committed Suicide Using Barbiturates, Autopsy Shows”, by Wayne King, April 19, 1989, The New York Times)

It was a misnomer for his former Chicago 8 comrade Tom Hayden to call Abbie Hoffman a “prophet” – Jerry Rubin had been in correctly stating that the drug abuse counterculture was “a scary society in itself”.

After Hoffman’s death, in 1991 Rubin relocated to Los Angeles, marketing a nutritional drink, WOW!, for a Texas company, making $60,000 a month. Nonetheless, his enthusiastic conversion to capitalism, and even his embrace of Ronald Reagan’s part of America, only managed to let Rubin live to 56 when he died in 1994– a paltry improvement over Hoffman’s struggling 52:

“Jerry Rubin, the flamboyant 1960’s radical who once preached distrust of “anyone over 30,” died on Monday night in a Los Angeles hospital where he was being treated after having been struck by a car two weeks earlier. He was 56 and lived in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles.

A hospital spokesman said the cause was cardiac arrest, but Mr. Rubin had been unconscious and in critical condition since he was hit on the night of Nov. 14 while jaywalking across Wilshire Boulevard in the Westwood section of Los Angeles. His former wife, Mimi Leonard Fleischman, said that he had suffered multiple injuries.

…

In 1978, Mr. Rubin, a son of a Cincinnati truck driver who became an official in the teamsters’ union, married Mimi Leonard, a former debutante who worked for ABC-TV in New York. They lived in a posh apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

…

In 1991 he moved to Los Angeles, where his business activities included marketing a nutritional drink named Wow! Forbes magazine reported in 1992 that Mr. Rubin said he was making $60,000 a month as a distributor for Omnitrition International, a Texas company that sold powdered mixes for Wow! and other beverages.”

(“Jerry Rubin, 56, Flashy 60’s Radical, Dies; ‘Yippies’ Founder and Chicago 7 Defendant”, by Eric Pace, November 30, 1994, The New York Times)

In 1989 Rubin had been the only one of the Chicago 8 to attend Hoffman’s funeral. Ironically in Los Angeles, Bobby Seale, the Black Panther leader criminally convicted separately from the other 7, became a salesman under Rubin for the Dallas-based company’s WOW! drink containing kelp, ginseng and bee pollen.

(“Jerry Rubin Dead At 56; ’60S Yippie — Radical Later Turned Yuppie Businessman”, by Jeff Wilson, November 29, 1994, The Seattle Times)

Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman each died like they lived – Rubin jaywalking across Wilshire Blvd. versus Hoffman overdosing on drug:

“Publicist Michael Sands, whose friendship with Rubin dated back to the 1960s, said Tuesday that when the two of them walked somewhere, Rubin almost always jaywalked.

Sands said that he, Rubin and Michael Ochs, brother of ’60s singer Phil Ochs, had tea together at the Regent Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills one night and then began scampering back and forth across Wilshire Boulevard in front of the hotel.

“We were like three little kids, running across the street,” Sands said. “We would wait until it looked clear, and then we would yell, ‘Let’s go! Let’s go!’ Then we would scoot across the street.””

(“Rubin Recalled as a Rebel of Many Causes: Remembrance: Long after shedding ’60s activist image, he enjoyed defying authority”, by Eric Malnic, November 30, 1994, The Los Angeles Times)

Rubin’s trendy LA friends were such juvenile delinquents, spellbound in jaywalking with him.

Rubin’s old Chicago 8 friends sighed, expressing sadness:

““He started as a straight political activist, but he (later) chose a path that I do not believe in,” David Dellinger said from his home in northern Vermont. “I’m not agreeing with what he did, but I still respect what he has done, and I love him.”

…

Rubin “was a great life force, full of spunk, courage and wit,” [California State Senator Tom] Hayden said late Monday. “I think his willingness to defy authority for constructive purposes will be missed. Up to the end, he was defying authority.””

(Eric Malnic, November 30, 1994, The Los Angeles Times)

In contrast, the pacifist, anti-war French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck lived a long life, and when he died at the age of 86 on November 13, 2014 – one day short of the 10-year mark of Jerry Rubin’s jaywalking accident – in the rural region of France where he had lived like a hermit, he was widely praised in France:

“Alexander Grothendieck, whose gift for deep abstraction excavated new ground in the field known as algebraic geometry and supplied a theoretical foundation for the solving of some of the most vexing conundrums of modern mathematics, died on Thursday in Ariège, in the French Pyrenees. He was 86.

A vexing character himself, Mr. Grothendieck … turned away from mathematics at the height of his powers in the early 1970s and had lived in seclusion since the early 1990s. His death was widely reported in France, where the newspaper Le Monde described him as “the greatest mathematician of the 20th century.” In a statement on Friday, President François Hollande praised him as “one of our greatest mathematicians” and “an out-of-the-ordinary personality in the philosophy of life.””

(Bruce Weber and Julie Rehmeyer, November 14, 2014, The New York Times)

Grothendieck was preceded in June, in France, by a much younger algebraic geometer and admirer, Xiao Gang, aged 62, mathematics professor at the University of Nice and creator of the online mathematical software WIMS.

(“Le professeur Xiao Gang, créateur du logiciel WIMS s’est éteint le vendredi 27 juin 2014”, by Université Nice Sophia Antipolis, Department of Mathematics, East China Normal University)

Five months after the passing of John Nash’s old friend Alexander Grothendieck at 86, the Norwegian government announced the recipients of the 2015 Abel Prize for mathematics: John Nash of Princeton University, and Louis Nirenberg of Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University.

A relatively new but generously endowed prize in honor of the 19th-century Norwegian mathematician Niels Henrik Abel, the prize is considered one of the highest honors in mathematics. It’s awarding to Nash was significant because it recognized Nash’s later work in pure mathematics, beyond his Nobel-winning work in economic game theory:

“… “The Abel Prize is top-level among mathematics prizes,” the 86-year-old Nash said in his soft voice. “There’s really nothing better.”

It is Nash’s work in geometry and partial differential equations that “the mathematical community regards as his most important and deepest work,” according to the academy. The prize citation recognized Nash and Nirenberg for “striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis.”

…

Nash’s name is attached to a range of influential work in mathematics, including the Nash-Moser inverse function theorem, the Nash-De Giorgi theorem (which stemmed from a problem Nash undertook at the suggestion of Nirenberg), and the Nash embedding theorems, which the academy described as “among the most original results in geometric analysis of the twentieth century.”

…

“The prize has redressed a historical anomaly in the public,” he [Princeton mathematician Sergiu Klainerman] said in reference to the popularity of Nash’s game-theory work. “We mathematicians know very well that [Nash] did far deeper work much later. These are the works for which he is finally recognized today by the most prestigious mathematics prize.””

(Morgan Kelly, March 26, 2015, News at Princeton)

As Princeton mathematician Sergiu Klainerman stated, in recognizing Nash for “far deeper work much later” the Abel Prize’s awarding addressed a historical anomaly.

Some of Nash’s later mathematical work was achieved under the diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. For example, among his work on nonlinear partial differential equations was a paper published in 1962 on Navier-Stokes equations for fluid dynamics:

“Nash was able to work again, something he had not been able to do for nearly three years. He turned once more to the mathematical analysis of the motion of fluids and certain types of nonlinear partial differential equations that can be used as models for such flows. He finished his paper on fluid dynamics, begun while he was in Trenton State Hospital [in 1961]. It was … published in 1962 in a French mathematical journal. …

“After Nash’s hospitalization he came out and seemed OK,” Atle Selberg recalled. “It was good for him to be at the IAS. Not everybody on the Princeton faculty was very friendly. It’s true that he didn’t speak. He wrote everything on blackboards. He was perfectly articulate in writing. He gave a lecture on Navier-Stokes equations …””

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

In my first blog article I made a similar point that Nash’s political thinking may have been credible, i.e., not “mentally ill” thinking:

“What else would be a better explanation than the above – beside Nash’s own brash behavior and his habit of convoluted language – that a mathematician of original thinking and prolific production who has now been recognized as having made fundamental contributions to the mathematical economic theory, and who has been called “the greatest numerologist the world has ever seen” (i.e., someone better than anyone else at the use of numbers in astrology and other human affairs) by the Princeton mathematician William Browder, was “mentally ill” when it came to his thinking about politics? Recognizing credibility in Nash’s political thoughts is like accepting his mathematical brilliance without automatically overriding any legitimate medical issue there might have been.”

(Part 2, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

The week of May 19 saw Abel festivities in Oslo, Norway, where Nash and Nirenberg were formally awarded the Abel Prize by King Harald V of Norway: the formal ceremony, with the showing of two short films made by filmmaker Ekaterina Eremenko for the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, featuring Nash and Nirenberg, respectively; wreath laying at the Abel Monument in Oslo; Abel lectures at the University of Oslo, including the Science Lecture by the mathematician Frank Morgan, titled “Soap Bubbles and Mathematics”; and the awardees’ visit to the University of Bergen to meet schoolchildren at a math circus and attend lectures.

(“Abel celebration in Oslo and Bergen”, and, “Nash and Nirenberg received the Abel Prize from the King of Norway”, 2015, Abelprize.no)

Frank Morgan, the 2015 Abel Science Lecturer, had earned a Princeton Ph.D. like Nash and been an MIT mathematics faculty member for 10 years – longer than Nash – and is a former vice president of the American Mathematical Society.

(“NIFTY FIFTY – BRING A TOP SCIENTIST TO YOUR MIDDLE OR HIGH SCHOOL: Dr. Frank Morgan”, U.S. Science and Engineering Festival)

In the ceremony film featuring John F. Nash, Nash departed his home for a walking tour of the Princeton campus, where the most personal part of the tour was his going first to his 1948 Ph.D. student office on the top floor of a majestic old building, an office currently occupied by a woman, furnished spartanly but decorated with many paintings, which touched off Nash’s comment that “in mathematics you don’t need so many resources”.

In this film, Nash said that he likes to think of himself as “a sort of enlightened philosopher” and thinks of himself as an “exceptional mind”, that he used to play the “Go” game, and that his work was “always original”. Nash also reaffirmed the sentiment in his 1994 Nobel autobiography, namely that politically-oriented thinking was a waste of effort, by saying, “Trying too hard to lead into thinking can lead into the wrong area.”

In the ceremony film featuring Louis Nirenberg, Nirenberg modestly insisted that he is not a top mathematician, that he can think of 50 mathematicians better than he is, and that he considers himself “very lucky”, “incredibly lucky”.

Going everywhere in a wheelchair on his own in this film, Nirenberg cut a confident figure wheeling through the aisles of a men’s formalwear store, and hailing a yellow taxicab for himself on a major New York City street, while professing his love for the “beautiful subject” of “inequalities”.

(“Shortfilms about John F. Nash and Louis Nirenberg”, by Ekaterina Eremenko, 2015, Abelprize.no)

Louis Nirenberg is originally Canadian; and he and Raoul Bott were both 1945 graduates of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec.

(“Louis Nirenberg”, 2015, Abelprize.no; and, Sir Michael Atiyah, U.S. National Academy of Sciences)

Several important Canadian links in the context of this Part’s stories have been discussed: Nash’s Ph.D. adviser Albert Tucker, and Nirenberg who shared the Abel Prize with Nash; Steve Smale’s Ph.D. adviser Raoul Bott, and Smale’s mother Helen and especially wife Clara’s parents.

Then the hard-to-imagine tragedy occurred.

On May 23, Nash, Alicia, Nirenberg and his wife arrived at the Newark Airport in New Jersey after the week of Abel festivities, 5 hours ahead of their schedule and the scheduled limousine service to pick up the Nashes. Nirenberg’s daughter Lisa Macbride, who came to pick up her parents, suggested that the Nashes took a taxi instead of waiting; so Nash and Alicia got into a yellow taxicab and headed home, when in the New Jersey Turnpike attempting to pass another car their taxi driver lost control and both cars hit the guard rail, killing Nash and Alicia:

“Nash, 86, and wife Alicia, 82, were supposed to have been met by a limo at Newark Airport on Saturday after arriving home from Norway, where the Princeton professor and his NYU colleague Louis Nirenberg were awarded the prestigious Abel Prize.

But the Nashes hailed a yellow cab back to Princeton after they switched their flight at the last minute and arrived in New Jersey five hours early, Nirenberg said.

The cab later crashed into a guardrail on the southbound New Jersey Turnpike in Monroe Township. Both Nash and his wife were thrown from the car, authorities said.

John and Alicia were pronounced dead at the scene at around 5:15 p.m. It was unclear whether they were wearing seat belts, cops said.

Nirenberg’s daughter, Lisa Macbride, said John Nash borrowed her cellphone to call for his limo when she arrived at Newark Airport to pick up her father.

Both couples had planned to arrive at 7 p.m., but their flight was changed and they got in at 2 p.m., she said.

“The car service said, ‘We thought you were getting in five hours later.’ They didn’t really offer a solution,” Macbride recalled.

“I said [to the Nashes], ‘You could take a taxi’ — which now I feel sick about.””

(“‘A Beautiful Mind’ mathematician John Nash killed in cab crash”, by Amber Sutherland, Kevin Sheehan and Bruce Golding, May 24, 2015, New York Post)

Had Lisa Macbride, whose father Louis Nirenberg has taken yellow taxis around New York City, not suggested the Nashes take a cab home!

Multiple callers to New Jersey state police’s 911 emergency number reported the crash scene at Mile 72.4 of the NJ Turnpike, where the Nashes lay motionless under the yellow taxicab:

“No, there’s two people under the car, we think they might be dead”.

(“911 recording reveals tragic moments after John and Alicia Nash’s fatal crash (AUDIO)”, by Anthony G. Attrino, July 9, 2015, NJ.com)

It was an unlucky highway location, where an accident in June 2014 had seriously injured actor Tracy Morgan:

“The crash happened in the same general area as the June 2014 crash that injured comedian Tracy Morgan, near Interchange 8A.”

(“DASHCAM VIDEO RELEASED FROM NJ TURNPIKE CRASH THAT KILLED ‘A BEAUTIFUL MIND’ MATHEMATICIAN JOHN NASH”, July 18, 2015, ABC Action News)

Morgan was in a limousine – the Nashes would have been transported by one had they waited at the airport for another 5 hours – one of Morgan’s companions, James McNair, was killed and several others also suffered serious injuries:

“Wal-Mart took “full responsibility” for the June 2014 wreck that claimed the life of 63-year-old comedian James McNair and seriously injured Morgan on June 7, the comedian’s attorneys said in a statement released by his attorneys.

Kevin Roper, a 35-year-old Georgia man who was driving a Wal-Mart tractor-trailer, was speeding and had been awake for more than 24 hours when the trailer collided with Morgan’s limousine…

Morgan suffered multiple fractures in the crash on the New Jersey Turnpike, and required multiple surgeries and rehabilitation. …

Comedian Ardie Fuqua, Morgan’s assistant Jeffrey Millea, and Millea’s wife Krista were also injured in the wreck. Morgan was returning from a performance in Delaware at the time of the crash.”

(“Tracy Morgan, Wal-Mart reach settlement in deadly New Jersey Turnpike crash”, by James Queally, May 27, 2015, Los Angeles Times)

John and Alicia Nash lived in West Windsor, NJ, where mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh had recently told Nash the city wanted to name a park after him but Nash replied he was still alive – now there will be a park named for John Nash:

“During Monday’s Memorial Day service, West Windsor mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh announced that a park will be named after the Nobel Prize winning mathematician.

“We are very proud of him and his accomplishments,” the mayor said, adding that he had approached John several months ago with the idea.

“He said ‘Mayor, I appreciate that, but I am still alive,” recalled Hsueh, who told him that you can still be honored while alive.”

(“Nash’s cab driver had only been driving for two weeks – report says”, by Dan Alexander, May 26, 2015, Jersey 101.5)

The yellow taxi the Nashes died in was a Ford Crown Victoria, driven by Tark (or Tarek) Girgis of Elizabeth, NJ, who had started his new taxi company and driven the cab for only 2 weeks; the other car that also crashed was a Chrysler:

“The cabby in the New Jersey Turnpike crash had been on the job only two weeks, after tooling around in an ice cream truck, the hack’s son told The Post.

…

The cabby, Tark Girgis of Elizabeth, NJ, remained hospitalized Sunday.

He had no idea he had been driving the famed math genius, said the driver’s son, Kerolos Girgis.

Tark Girgis began driving the taxi only two weeks ago, his son said.

“He started a new company . . . I drive the ice cream truck now,” said Kerolos Girgis, 19.

…

The New Jersey State Police said their crash occurred around 4:30 p.m., when Girgis lost control of his Ford Crown Victoria while trying to pass another car and smashed into the guardrail near Interchange 8A.

The other car, a Chrysler, also hit the rail, and a passenger was treated for neck pain, cops said.

No charges were filed against Girgis, who had to be cut from the wreckage, but an investigation was continuing, said State Police Sgt. Gregory Williams.

Girgis has “many stitches” in both arms and “hasn’t said anything about the accident” since getting airlifted to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, NJ, his son said.

…

Tydyn Limousine of Trenton, NJ — the service scheduled to pick up the Nashes — didn’t return a call for comment.”

(Amber Sutherland, Kevin Sheehan and Bruce Golding, May 24, 2015, New York Post)

Alicia Nash had recently feared they might suddenly die and left their son John Charles, who had the same mental illness as his father, without support; now her worst fear has realized:

“The wife of famed math genius John Nash Jr. recently worried that she and her Nobel Prize-winning husband might suddenly die, leaving their mentally ill son without their support, a close pal said Monday.

“There was always a premonition . . . that Alicia had,” said Debra Wentz, a longtime friend of Alicia Nash, who was killed with her husband Saturday in a New Jersey Turnpike taxi crash.

“She was worried, because they were aging, that at some point, they wouldn’t be around forever, and they were worried about the well-being of their son,” Wentz said.

The couple’s child, John “Johnny” Charles Nash, 56, suffers from schizophrenia, the same mental disorder that plagued his father. Professor Nash’s struggle with the disease was chronicled in the Oscar-winning movie “A Beautiful Mind,” in which he was played by Russell Crowe.

Johnny, who lives in his parents’ West Windsor, NJ, home, and Nash’s other son, John Stier of Lynn, Mass., are still shocked by their famous father’s sudden death, Wentz said.”

(“Worst fear realized: John Nash’s mentally ill son now alone”, by Priscilla DeGregory, Lorena Mongelli and Emily Saul, May 26, 2015, New York Post)

Receiving the Abel Prize in Norway, the Nashes had just missed their last May 20 birthday for John Charles. Recall that back in July 1959, “Johnny” was an unnamed baby when the Nashes sailed on the Queen Mary, without him onboard, for Europe where Nash intended to renounce his U.S. citizenship, and by St. Etienne’s Day John Charles was an “eight-month old” when Shiing-shen Chern and Alexander Grothendieck attended the Nashes’ party at 49 Avenue de la Republique in Paris.

Then in the summer of 1964 Nash sailed again on the Queen Mary to Europe for a one-year position at IHES that Grothendieck had offered him, but Grothendieck was nowhere to be found in Paris, and after visiting Rome and hanging around Paris Nash sailed back on the Queen Mary.

John Forbes Nash, Jr., died 3 weeks short of his June 13 birthday, still 86 years of age – like his old friend Grothendieck who had died 6 months earlier.

Nash and Grothendieck each died like they had lived – Nash with Alicia in the glory of elite accomplishment, now being chauffeured instead of driving a Mercedes, versus Grothendieck in hermit seclusion, missing the Abel Prize:

“When the Abel Prize was announced in 2001, I got very excited and started wondering who would be the first person to get it. I asked my friends and colleagues who they thought was the greatest mathematician alive. I got the same answer from every person I asked: Alexander Grothendieck. Well, Alexander Grothendieck is not the easiest kind of person to give a prize to, since he rejected the mathematical community and lives in seclusion.

Years later I told this story to my friend Ingrid Daubechies. She pointed out to me that my spontaneous poll was extremely biased. Indeed, I was asking only Russian mathematicians living abroad who belonged to “Gelfand’s school.” Even so, the unanimity of those responses continues to amaze me.

Now several years have passed and it does not seem that Alexander Grothendieck will be awarded the Prize. Sadly, my advisor Israel Gelfand died without getting the Prize either. I am sure I am biased with respect to Gelfand. He was extremely famous in Soviet Russia, although less well-known outside, which may have affected the decision of the Abel’s committee.”

(“The Greatest Mathematician Alive”, by Tanya Khovanova, March 20, 2010, Tanya Khovanova’s Math Blog)

As the mathematician Tanya Khovanova recalled, her mathematical friends in Israel Gelfand’s school of mathematical thought unanimously rated Grothendieck the greatest living mathematician when asked in 2001.

The clearest signal that the Abel Prize was going to bypass Grothendieck came in 2013 when it was awarded to Pierre Deligne, alone, Grothendieck’s former student and co-awardee of the Crafoord Prize in 1988, which Grothendieck rejected:

“The letters page of Le Monde contained a copy of the letter that had been sent by Alexandre Grothendieck, one of the world’s great mathematicians, to the Swedish Academy of Science. …

The Crafoord Prize had recently been established by the Swedish Academy to honor achievements in mathematics, astronomy, the geosciences and biology (with an emphasis on the cure of polyarthritis). The first 3 fields were not included in Alfred Nobel’s will. An apocryphal story has it that Nobel held a grudge against mathematicians because his wife was having an affair with the mathematician Mittag-Loeffler. Another theory is that Nobel believed that mathematics was a science with few practical applications.

…

… The introductory paragraph to the letter published in Le Monde reads:

French Mathematician Alexander Grothendieck Rejects Crafoord Prize

“The French mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck, who won the Fields Medal in 1986 [1966], the equivalent to the Nobel Prize in mathematics has just rejected the Crafoord Prize awarded him by the Swedish Academy of Sciences. (Le Monde, April 17-18) . This prize, worth 1.5 million French francs ( Note: $250,000 at the current rate of exchange ) which he was expected to share with one of his former students, the Belgian Pierre Deligne has, since 1982 been rewarding research scientists working in the disciplines of mathematics, earth sciences, astronomy and biology. The French geophysicist Claude Allegre figured among its laureates in 1986. …””

(“Visiting Alexandre Grothendieck”, by Roy Lisker, June 1988, Ferment Magazine)

I imagine if you rejected a prize from the King of Sweden you would not be offered another by the King of Norway.

On the other hand, a scientific mind may disagree: the Crafoord Prize was to fill the Nobel Prize’s void but Alfred Nobel had scorned mathematics, whereas Niels Henrik Abel had been a forefather of modern algebraic geometry for which Alexander Grothendieck was a grand architect.

Oh well, Grothendieck is already dead.

The confident hermit had told his visitor Roy Lisker in June 1988 that his own death would come in 2009:

“I’ve got exactly 21 more years to live; it’s all been revealed to me. But the Millenium will come before my death.”

(Roy Lisker, June 1988, Ferment Magazine)

French hermitage would give you 5 more years, Dr. Grothendieck, as it had given Napoleon Bonaparte.

John Nash at least survived Grothendieck, as well as most of the mathematicians mentioned in this blog article surrounding the issue of his mental health stemming from his 1958-1959 political activism.

Adrian Albert, the University of Chicago mathematics department chair who made the offer of a “prestigious chair” to Nash in 1958, died in 1972 at only 66. Albert later served as American Mathematical Society president in 1965-1966.

(“Abraham Adrian Albert 1905—1972”, by Irving Kaplansky, 1980, U.S. National Academy of Sciences; and, “AMS Presidents: A Timeline, 38. Abraham Adrian Albert (1905-1972)”, American Mathematical Society)

Norman Levinson, former Communist and Nash’s senior colleague at MIT, to whom Albert inquired about Nash’s “Emperor of Antarctica” frame of mind in 1959, and who told Ted Martin that Nash was “very paranoid”, died in 1975 at only 63. Levinson later succeeded Martin as MIT math department chair, serving for 3 years.

(“Norman Levinson 1912-1975”, by D. G. Aronson, 2013, U.S. National Academy of Sciences)

Alberto Galmarino, one of the two MIT graduate students Nash invited to a walk with around Thanksgiving 1958, when Nash talked to them about world peace and world government, died in 2004 at 75. Galmarino named his daughter Alicia.

(“Obituaries: Mary K. Walls, homemaker; at 76”, March 28, 2004, The Boston Globe)

Ted Martin, former Communist and MIT math department chair, who tried to stop Nash’s political activism and also affected the university’s decision about Nash in 1959, died in 2004 at 92. Martin held the MIT mathematics department chair position from 1947 to 1968, was a former American Mathematical Society vice president, an AMS trustee and later AMS treasurer from 1965 to 1973.

(“Longtime math department head Ted Martin dies at 92”, June 4, 2004, MIT News; and, “Inside the AMS: William Ted Martin (1911–2004)”, September 2004, Notices of the American Mathematical Society)

Paul Cohen, Nash’s MIT colleague involved in the circumstance of Nash’s 1959 psychiatric committal, later a Stanford professor and a 1966 Fields Medal recipient like Smale and Grothendieck, died in 2007 at only 72. Cohen taught at MIT for only one academic year, 1958-1959 – the year of John Nash’s short-lived political activism and fall into hell.

(“Paul Cohen, winner of world’s top mathematics prize, dies at 72”, by Dawn Levy, March 28, 2007, Stanford News; and, “Paul J. Cohen, Mathematics Trailblazer, Dies at 72”, by Jeremy Pearce, April 2, 2007, The New York Times)

Nash also survived Raoul Bott, who was more senior than him at Carnegie Tech and Princeton, and who then went to teach at Michigan, produced the mathematician Steve Smale, before moving permanently to Harvard in 1960. Bott died at 82 in 2005.

(Sir Michael Atiyah, U.S. National Academy of Sciences)

Nash also survived two mathematicians who moved to Berkeley: David Gale, who helped him develop his Princeton Ph.D. work that decades later won him the Nobel Prize, who died in 2008 at 86; and Shiing-shen Chern, who partied with him and Grothendieck on St. Etienne’s Day 1959, at 49 Avenue de la Republique in Paris – like MIT’s Ted Martin, Chern was born in 1911 and died in 2004 but after his 93rd birthday.

(“Mathematician, puzzle lover David Gale has died”, by Robert Sanders, March 18, 2008, and, “Renowned mathematician Shiing-Shen Chern, who revitalized the study of geometry, has died at 93 in Tianjin, China”, by Robert Sanders, December 6, 2004, UC Berkeley News)

After that St. Etienne’s Day, the road Chern travelled was in a sense opposite Grothendieck’s. Having left China to escape Communist takeover, Chern stayed clear of UC Berkeley’s 1960s anti-war activities and, rather than leaving mathematical research, after his 1979 retirement went on to become founder and leader of two premier international mathematical institutions, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley, and the Nankai Institute of Mathematics at Nankai University, Tianjin, China:

“Chern, who became a U.S. citizen in 1961, joined UC Berkeley’s mathematics department in 1960 and retired in 1979, only to return as cofounder and first director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), the largest and most prominent math institute in the world. The building on the UC Berkeley campus housing the institute, which he directed from 1981 until 1984, will be named Chern Hall upon the completion of a new addition in late 2005.

…

MSRI was one of three mathematics institutes he founded during his 70-year career. In China, he established the Institute of Mathematics of the Academia Sinica, building it from the ground up in the 1940s and ’50s as a training ground for a “glorious generation of Chinese mathematicians,” [UC Berkeley math professor Hung-Hsi] Wu said. Chern also founded in 1984 the Nankai Institute of Mathematics at Nankai University in Tianjin, which built a home on the campus a short distance away so that Chern, by then in a wheelchair, could come to work every day. Still active in mathematics at the time of this death, Chern was honorary director of the institute.”

(Robert Sanders, December 6, 2004, UC Berkeley News)

As quoted earlier, the Institute of Mathematics of the Academia Sinica in China was founded by Lifu Jiang with help from Chern, who and whose family then left China in 1948. Lifu Jiang was Chern’s first mathematics professor, at Chern’s alma mater of Nankai University, as Chern recalled:

“The Mathematics Department at Nankai was a one-man department whose Professor, Dr. Li-Fu Chiang, received his Ph.D. from Harvard with Julian Coolidge. Mathematics was at a primitive state in China in the late 1920s. …”

(“A Summary of My Scientific Life and Works”, by Shiing-shen Chern, in S. Y. Cheng, G. Tian and Peter Li, eds., A Mathematician and His Mathematical Work: Selected Papers of S.S. Chern, 1996, World Scientific)

These historical credits of Chern’s were personally significant for me in the late 1960s, late 1970s and late 1980s: Lifu Jiang was later the most senior professor at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, my future alma mater, and for a couple of years in the late 1960s my family lived in a house across from Professor Jiang’s, my father at the time a lecturer in philosophy; Jiang passed away in February 1978 around the time I entered his former Sun Yat-sen University math department as a freshman; later in 1986 at what is now Chern Hall at MSRI in Berkeley I gave my first seminar presentation on the research results to become my Ph.D. thesis, and my 1989 published paper on these results carried an affiliation with the Nankai Institute, courtesy of Professor Chern.

That the MSRI has had its share of fanfares in the San Francisco Bay Area can be seen from the following 2003 news story:

“THE SMART SET: The Mathematical Sciences Research Institute — the group that brought Steve Martin to the stage of Herbst to romp with Robin Williams recently — is celebrating plans for a new library with a reception April 24. Institute chairman is William R. Hearst III, whose B.A. was in mathematics, who is the son of Austine McDonnell Hearst for whom the library will be named, and whose family’s company owns this newspaper.

The entertainment for the celebration is Stanford University statistics and mathematics Professor Persi Diaconis, who’s a professional magician and winner of a MacArthur fellowship, and who figured out that a deck of cards needs to be shuffled seven times to be randomized, which means mixed up, which is just what he isn’t.”

(“A star orbits a sun / Leonardo had a great serve”, by Leah Garchik, April 18, 2003, SFGate.com)

William Randolph Hearst III of the Hearst family was the chairman of Berkeley’s MSRI!

Not exactly, Hearst was a MSRI trustee and chairman of MSRI Archimedes Society, while the MSRI mathematicians were interested in the Riemann Hypothesis, something John Nash had thought he could solve:

“Museion is named for the legendary institute at Ancient Alexandria, the hall of the Muses and the place of study of Archimedes, Eratosthenes, Hypatia, and Euclid. Museion recognizes donors at the Museion level to the Archimedes Society at Mathematical Sciences Research Institute.

…

The first Museion convened in Berkeley on the evening of October 25, 2001, hosted by Archimedes Society chairman and MSRI trustee William R. Hearst, III. Nobel Laureate Donald A. Glaser gave a talk on “Mathematical Attempts to Understand the Brain” and Professor Robert Osserman gave a talk on “A Million Dollar Problem: Riemann and His Hypothesis.” A duo violin concerto was performed by Bill Barbini and Kineko Okumura.”

(“Museion, an evening of dining, music, lecture, discussion”, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute)

The California billionaire had a Harvard mathematics degree – something John Nash wished – and has been involved with several prominent science organizations, according to his profile at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers:

“William R. Hearst III joined KPCB in January, 1995, and currently serves on the boards of Akimbo, Applied Minds, Juniper Networks, Oblix, OnFiber, and RGB Networks. In addition to his portfolio company boards, he is also a director of the Hearst Corporation and Hearst-Argyle Television. Hearst is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a trustee of: The Hearst Foundation, Carnegie Institution of Washington, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, California Academy of Sciences, and Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Will Hearst was Editor and Publisher of the San Francisco Examiner from 1984 until 1995. He is a 1972 graduate of Harvard University, holding an AB degree in Mathematics.”

(“William Hearst III”, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers)

William Hearst as a Berkeley MRSI trustee was also relevant in the context of the colorful history of his cousin, former UC Berkeley student Patty Hearst, who was kidnaped by the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974 and turned into a gun-toting revolutionary:

“Long before the 1974 kidnapping, the Hearst name was well-known. Her grandfather, publishing tycoon William Randolph Hearst, practically invented tabloid journalism. His story inspired Orson Welles to make the 1941 movie classic “Citizen Kane.”

Patricia Campbell Hearst was born February 20, 1954, in San Francisco, California. …

Her father, Randolph A. Hearst, was chairman of the board of the Hearst Corp., which owns a chain of newspapers, magazines and radio and TV stations. Her mother, Catherine Hearst, was a University of California regent.

Patty Hearst, who prefers to be called Patricia, attended a series of Catholic schools, earning As and Bs. A young teacher, Steven Weed, tutored her in math at one high school, and eventually the two became lovers.

…

After Weed received a graduate fellowship and teaching grant at the University of California, the two moved into an apartment in Berkeley. Hearst enrolled at Berkeley for her sophomore year, majoring in art history. The 19-year-old became engaged to Weed with plans to marry in summer 1974.

…

Hearst’s life changed irrevocably on the evening of February 4, 1974. Members of the Berkeley-based group SLA dragged the young heiress screaming at gunpoint from her apartment, threw her into the trunk of a car and drove her to a hideaway south of San Francisco.

…

The group then demanded that Hearst’s parents give millions of dollars to feed California’s poor. The Hearst family and Hearst Foundation responded with about $2 million in food for the Bay area needy, but negotiations broke down when the SLA sought an additional $4 million. Randolph Hearst said he couldn’t meet that amount, but the Hearst Corp. did offer to put the money in escrow, dependent on Patty Hearst’s release.

…

Eventually Hearst said she was given an option — she could become part of the SLA or be killed. She agreed to join and was christened with a new name — Tania.

…

To show off its newest recruit, the SLA targeted a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco. The April 15, 1974, heist netted more than $10,000 for the group, which was short on funds. Bank surveillance cameras showed Hearst holding a rifle. Two bystanders were shot.

…

On May 16, 1974, Hearst sprayed a barrage of gunfire outside a Los Angeles sporting goods store to help free SLA member Bill Harris, detained for shoplifting, and his wife, Emily, who had come to his aid.

…

The FBI finally caught up with Hearst more than 18 months after her kidnapping. She was arrested in San Francisco on September 18, 1975.”

(“Patty Hearst Profile: Radically different”, CNN.com)

When she was kidnaped in 1974, art history student Patty Hearst was living with her former math-teacher fiancé Steven Weed, who was a philosophy graduate student at Berkeley.

(“The Kidnapping That Gripped the Nation / Heiress Patty Hearst’s abduction 25 years ago took the entire country on a wild ride”, by William Carlsen, February 4, 1999, SFGate.com)

The day Patty Hearst was born in 1954 my father, then a Sun Yat-sen University Chinese Literature student, turned 21; but that coincidence had no apparent link to her kidnapping nearly 20 years later.

(“The myth of political vendetta in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Airbus Affair investigation, the politics of Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien, and some social undercurrents in Canada (Part 1)”, February 20, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

In 2004 Maria Klawe, then dean of engineering and applied science at Princeton University as in Part 1, became an MSRI trustee.

(“Board of Trustees (all)”, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute)

As in Part 1, back in 1991 I, then a computer science faculty member at the University of British Columbia, spoke to her about issues regarding her UBC computer science headship, she emphasized her trusteeship at the American Mathematical Society, and I responded that I had voted for her for that but it was a different matter.

After I left UBC, in 1995 Klawe was promoted to UBC vice president, and in 1995-1996 she was chair of AMS board of trustees.

(“CURRICULUM VITAE: MARIA M. KLAWE”, February 7, 2014, Harvey Mudd College)

MSRI is a much smaller but more prestigious organization than the AMS. In fact, the current AMS president, Robert Bryant, is a former chair of MSRI’s board of trustees, and the MSRI director from 2007 to 2013.

(“AMS Presidents: A Timeline, 63. Robert L. Bryant (1953 – )”, American Mathematical Society)

William Randolph Hearst III retired in 2011 and now there isn’t a business tycoon of that calibre on the MSRI board of trustees, but Klawe’s new Fortune magazine accolade in 2014 is impressive in her own right:

“Klawe is one of the ten members of the board of Microsoft Corporation, a board member of Broadcom Corporation and the nonprofit Math for America, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, a trustee for the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley and a member of the Stanford Engineering Advisory Council, the Advisory Council for the Computer Science Teachers Association, and the Canada Excellence Research Chairs Selection Board. She is co-chair of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Simons Institute at UC Berkeley. She is the recipient of the 2014 Women of Vision ABIE Award for Leadership and was ranked 17 on Fortune’s 2014 list of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders.”

(“Personal Profile of Dr. Maria M. Klawe”, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute)

She was “ranked 17 on Fortune’s 2014 list of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders” – I doubt William R. Hearst III has that.

As discussed in Part 1, Klawe attained it on the basis of her Harvey Mudd College presidency, “leading the charge to bring more women into science, technology, and engineering”.

(“The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders”, March 20, 2014, Fortune)

But I am not aware of anything politically rebellious in Klawe’s family history that had the kind of radical Berkeley political color Patty Hearst had, even if involuntary. As in Part 1, Klawe’s parents were former professors and her father also a former chief cartographer of Thomas Nelson & Sons, one of the oldest publishers of Sherlock Holmes stories. It was a past Klawe has been proud of.

Bu as in Part 1, Klawe did have a period of dropping out of school and living with her Yale-dropout boyfriend in India, a kind of non-hostile nonconformity to have for someone her corporate and management career ambitions; in addition, before transitioning to computer science after earning her University of Alberta Ph.D., she did teach mathematics for a year in 1977-1978 at Michigan’s Oakland university – the state Smale came from with a student movement background, and the namesake of Berkeley’s neighboring city which the 1965 Vietnam Day Committee marches failed to enter in 1965.

(February 7, 2014, Harvey Mudd College)

Klawe’s previous dean position at Princeton was important in her career advance as it positioned her to interact with a broader elite circle than at UBC: as a Princeton dean she appeared at a Microsoft Research Summit alongside Bill Gates, several years before becoming a board director of Microsoft Corporation.

Her Princeton stint is an interesting coincidence to John Nash’s remark, quoted earlier, made in his Abel Prize film at his old Princeton office now occupied by a woman and decorated with many paintings; Klawe is an amateur painter, and one of her paintings hung in Princeton president Shirley Tilghman’s office as Klawe described:

“Moving to Princeton as Dean of Engineering in 2003 brought another quantum leap in my confidence as an artist. Upon leaving UBC we held an online auction of fifty of my paintings as a fund-raiser for an endowed scholarship fund that I’d started in memory of my father. Princeton’s president, Shirley Tilghman, purchased a painting to hang in her office (one of those first fourteen that I had framed), and routinely introduced me as the new dean of engineering and talented artist. I found that everyone at Princeton loved the fact that I paint (Princeton revels in well-rounded students and faculty).”

(“Art and Computer Science: A Double Life”. Maria Klawe, March 26, 2006, National Center for Women & Information Technology)

Princeton was a quantum leap for Klawe, not just for her confidence as an artist or for her fundraising in memory of her late father.

In a similar sense, Klawe’s Fortune magazine feature as one of the world’s 50 greatest leaders in 2014 was like the takeover of a success symbol once prominently to be John Nash’s – alongside two retiring patriarch figures in mathematics, Oswald Veblen and Richard Courant – featured in the summer of 1958 in a Fortune article, “The new uses of the abstract”, shortly before Nash’s start of political activism that would end in psychiatric committal:

“The new uses of the abstract,” …

…

Pioneers in new fields of applied mathematics

John Nash

John Nash just turned thirty. Nash has already made a reputation as a brilliant mathematician who is eager to tackle the most difficult problems. He is one of the few young mathematicians who have done important work in both pure and applied mathematics. While an undergraduate at Carnegie Tech, he formulated some of the basic concepts of modern game theory. Shortly after, he made original contributions to the highly abstract field of algebraic geometry. Later he developed some new theorems about certain non-linear differential equations that are important in pure and applied mathematics. He is now an associate professor at M.I.T. and is looking into quantum theory. He also applies mathematics to one of his hobbies: stock-market predictions.

Oswald Veblen Veblen

Oswald Veblen Veblen, still a first-rate mathematician at seventy-eight, picked the original faculty, including Albert Einstein and John von Neumann, for the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Unlike his uncle Thor-stein, the cantankerous sociologist, Oswald Veblen is mild-mannered. But when he wants his way, colleagues say, he manages to get it.

Richard Courant

A genius for raising funds has helped Courant, seventy, build up New York University’s Institute of Mathematical Sciences into the nation’s outstanding center of applied mathematical analysis. Until 1933 he headed the then world-famous applied-mathematics department of the University of Göttingen, and he has modeled the N.Y.U. center on it.”

(“This 1958 Fortune article introduced the world to John Nash and his math”, by Stephen Gandel, May 30, 2015, Fortune)

Nash was featured as a pioneer of “new mathematics” along with Oswald Veblen, the founding mathematician of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, and Richard Courant, the founding mathematician of New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and former head of the world-famous applied mathematics program at the University of  Göttingen – prior to the rise of Nazi Germany.

The American Mathematical Society has had a Oswald Veblen Prize since 1964, awarded once every few years: C. D. Papakyriakopoulos and Raoul Bott were the first two recipients, in 1964, and Steve Smale was the third recipient, in 1966, the year of his Fields Medal.

(“Prize: Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry”, American Mathematical Society)

In 1958 it was obvious to Fortune magazine who the future leader of mathematics was going to be!

I can certainly imagine John Nash emboldened by this Fortune feature, striving to become a leader of mathematicians with broader appeals than in their math fields: world-peace activism, given the prior profiles of persons like Einstein, and the devastation wrought by World War II to world-famous mathematical sciences in Germany, seemed a logical choice.

But within months Nash’s fortune was no more. Now Maria Klawe, originally from Alberta, Canada, has taken over the Fortune mantle of recognition for a mathematician.

Klawe’s claim to fame is on bringing more women into science, technology and engineering. In today’s liberal political environment of equality, it can’t go wrong, can it? As in Part 1,  it has given Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella goose bumps.

The University of British Columbia persons, especially computer scientists, may be familiar with a Maria Klawe painting consisting of portraits of the late Alain Fournier, founding faculty member of the UBC computer graphics group, that is publicly available on the website of Pierre Poulin, one of Fournier’s former Ph.D. students who came to UBC with him in 1989.

(“Alain Fournier, a life in pictures”, and, “Painting by Maria Klawe”, Pierre Poulin, Département d’informatique et de recherche opérationnelle, Université de Montréal)

Though not a famous scientist like John Nash, Alain Fournier, recipient of the 1994 Achievement Award of the Canadian Human-Computer Communications Society, has been a name familiar to those in the computer graphics field.

(“Alain Fournier: 1994 Achievement Award”, Graphics Interface)

During the 1990s, computer graphics was the trendiest and highest-priority field at UBC computer science department. In a May 2011 blog post, I recalled that in 1990 I applied to convert my fixed-term faculty position to a tenure-track one, but the tenure-track position was later offered to a new Stanford Ph.D., Jack Snoeyink, who had research connection to computer graphics:

“Kelly Booth, a leader of the Computer Graphics group, had received his Berkeley Ph.D. under “Dick” Karp years before, thus apparently the offer to Jack Snoeyink had to do with Jack’s research connection to Computer Graphics as well as lack of a key affirmation for me. Alain Fournier, the other leader of the group, unfortunately died of cancer in year 2000.”

(“Team Canada female athletes disqualified from Commonwealth silver medal, jailed Chinese democracy activist awarded with Nobel peace prize, and others in between (Part 4) — when power and control are the agenda”, May 24, 2011)

Fournier and research associate Peter Cahoon, along with students like Poulin, founded UBC’s first computer graphics laboratory, Imager, in 1989:

“The Imager Laboratory was established in 1989 by Dr. Alain Fournier and his students, and research associate Dr. Peter Cahoon. Over the next few years they were joined by faculty members Dr. Kellogg Booth, Dr. David Forsey, Dr. Dinesh Pai, and Dr. Jack Snoeyink, and by a number of new graduate students.”

(“History”, Imager Laboratory, University of British Columbia)

So it was rather surprising that both the founding faculty member and the founding researcher of UBC’s computer graphics field in 1989, died in 2000:

“Forever Missed…

Dr. Alain Fournier

Founding Professor and Member of Imager 1989-2000

In memoriam

Dr. Peter Cahoon

Research Associate and Member of Imager 1989-2000

In memoriam”

(“Imager Alumni”, Imager Laboratory, University of British Columbia)

It was odd coincidence, wasn’t it? Fournier died of cancer, I later heard that he had already had a bout coming to UBC in 1989, and that Cahoon died of a mysterious brain disease.

Peter Cahoon had written a book of poetry. Since both Fournier and Cahoon died in 2000, Cahoon possibly early in the year as I seem to recall, a Cahoon poem reminded me of the Millennium Bug as the New Year arrived in 2000, discussed in Part 1; here are some of the lines in that poem reminding me of the ‘Y2K bug’:

“At five a.m.
A sleep sullen soul
Stares blankly into
Empty space.
A knife edge darts
Along a crooked smile
Its dark converging lines concede
The adrenal grip of treason.”

“Your limp mind’s
Crippled fingers
Long to pull,
To grapple with intent
But its tired arms are bent
From falling stones.
Its future is held forth
In mawkish leaps.”

“All new realities come
As sprawling notes
At the end of
A longer page.”

(“Dr. Peter Cahoon”, Imager Laboratory, University of British Columbia; and, Peter G. Cahoon, Travels on a Listening Dark : Poems, 1993)

So in my very first blog post, “Greeting the New Millennium – nearly a decade late”, dated January 29, 2009, the following metaphor of “vampires … taking away … tormented souls” was written with Alain Fournier and Peter Cahoon in mind:

“Fortunately, when the New Year of 2000 finally came nothing of a catastrophic type happened, though among the worldwide euphoria of New Millennium celebrations one wondered if there might not be a few vampires arriving for the occasion and taking away with them some tormented souls.”

(Part 1, January 29, 2009, Feng Gao’s Space: Analysis of Current Affairs, Politics and History)

Unlike the unusual coincidence of the deaths of Alain Fournier and Peter Cahoon, some deaths of two interconnected persons, while unusual in their coincidence, were viewed as part of the normal life: when Alexander Grothendieck was lecturing in Hanoi during the Vietnam War in November 1967, a U.S. warplane dropped a “delayed-action” cluster bomb, and it killed two mathematics instructors –as tricky as the killings were they occurred in the same wartime incident.

Some separate deaths of two interconnected persons were more unsettling due to their political backgrounds: Jerry Rubin, who founded the UC Berkeley Vietnam Day Committee with Steve Smale, went on to found the Youth International Party with Abbie Hoffman; Hoffman died in 1989 and Rubin in 1994 – both UC Berkeley graduates, Yippies founders, and in their 50s.

Some interconnected persons lived to a good age before they died, but the coincidence of two deaths can still be interesting: Ted Martin, John Nash’s MIT math department chair in 1958-1959, and Shiing-shen Chern, at the time a University of Chicago math professor who strongly supported hiring Nash there, were both long-time academic leaders, Martin chairing the MIT department for over 20 years and serving in various management roles at the American Mathematical Society, and Chern founding and leading two premier international mathematical institutions – both were born in 1911 and both died in 2004.

Then there were Alexander Grothendieck and John Nash himself: two old friends, each active in own political activism to the point that the prominent career was adversely affected, Nash due to diagnosis of mental illness and Grothendieck due to withdrawal from mathematical research – both died at 86, Nash a few months after Grothendieck.

At first glance, the Grothendieck-Nash coincidence does not appear as clear as the Martin-Chern comparison with its matches of both birth year and death year numbers. However, the mathematical circumstances offered more links between the deaths of Grothendieck and Nash, beyond both being at 86 (and having been born in the same year).

When Grothendieck died on November 13, 2014, he forever missed the Abel Prize, of which he should have been one of the most rightful awardees – as the Israel Gelfand school of Russian mathematicians have strongly expressed – or at least given his set of mathematical achievements.

Soon in March 2015, Nash was among the first awardees of the Abel Prize following Grothendieck’s death. In this context, Nash’s death on his way back from the award ceremony becomes an additional layer of connection to Grothendieck, shortly before and just after the 2015 Abel Prize – a layer of mathematical relevance in the death timings that do not obviously exist between, e.g., the 2008 death of David Gale also at 86 and Nash’s in 2015.

Why was Nash then given this award?

Princeton University’s news release, quoted earlier, succinctly described Nash’s mathematical achievements that earned him the award, in particular the Nash-De Giorgi theorem:

“Nash’s name is attached to a range of influential work in mathematics, including the Nash-Moser inverse function theorem, the Nash-De Giorgi theorem (which stemmed from a problem Nash undertook at the suggestion of Nirenberg), and the Nash embedding theorems, which the academy described as “among the most original results in geometric analysis of the twentieth century.””

(Morgan Kelly, March 26, 2015, News at Princeton)

So Nash and Louis Nirenberg were awarded the 2015 Abel Prize together due to their relations in research, including the Nash-De Giorgi theorem which Nash had undertaken at Nirenberg’s suggestion.

I wonder if Grothendieck’s death became a factor for awarding to these two as soon as possible: Nash was also 86 and Nirenberg, born February 28, 1925, was already 90!

(“Interview with Louis Nirenberg”, by Allyn Jackson, April 2002, Notices of the American Mathematical Society)

What was the Nash-De Giorgi theorem? The Abel Prize committee has explained it:

“Nash won one of the first Sloan Fellowships in 1956 and chose to take a year’s sabbatical at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton. He based himself not in Princeton, but in New York, where he spent much of his time at Richard Courant’s fledgling Institute for Applied Mathematics at NYU. It was here Nash met Louis Nirenberg, who suggested to him that he work on a major open problem in nonlinear theory concerning inequalities associated with elliptic partial differential equations. Within a few months Nash had proved the existence of these inequalities. Unknown to him, the Italian mathematician Ennio De Giorgi had already proved this, using a different method, and the result is known as the Nash-De Giorgi theorem.”

(“John Forbes Nash Jr.”, Abelprize.no)

So Nash was for a time affiliated with Princeton’s IAS founded by Oswald Veblen while spending the actual time at NYU’s Courant Institute founded by Richard Courant – I note it has been located near the Wall Street and Financial District and the 1958 Fortune article, “The new uses of the abstract”, mentioned Nash’s stock-market prediction hobby – where Nirenberg suggested a math problem to him; Nash solved it, however Ennio De Giorgi in Italy had proved it first.

Why doesn’t the Abel Prize committee call it the De Giorgi-Nash theorem, then?

I would presume John Nash is apparently the elite symbol. According to Sylvia Nasar’s book, the Italian mathematician Ennio De Giorgi lived a life of poverty:

“De Giorgi, who died in 1996, came from a very poor family in Lecce in southern Italy. … He had no life outside mathematics, no family of his own or other close relationships, and, even later, literally lived in his office.”

(Sylvia Nasar, 1998, Simon & Schuster)

In my imagination, this background is where my “vampire” metaphor came in surrounding Nash’s death.

On May 23, 2015, after arriving at the Newark Liberty International Airport from the Abel Prize ceremony, Nirenberg’s daughter Lisa Macbride suggested to the Nashes that they take a taxi instead of waiting for 5 hours for their limo service. So the Nashes did, and the driver of the yellow taxicab then gave them what turned out to be their last, deadly ride – Nash died short of his June 13 birthday, so still 86 like Grothendieck, but in the glory of a prize Grothendieck should have been awarded but wasn’t.

How randomly likely is it, when a Nirenberg suggestion had led to Nash’s fame in association with De Giorgi and a top award, that returning from the award ceremony a Nirenberg daughter suggestion brought Nash a driver named Girgis?

If it wasn’t your guardian angel, it was probably a vampire.

(Continuing to Part 3)