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in the movie, when it looks as if things were all over for Nash, his wife, Alicia, takes John’s hand, places it over her heart, and says, “I have to believe that something extraordinary is possible.”
    Something extraordinary was possible.
    Of all the letters I’ve received from readers, my favorite came from a homeless man. It arrived in a dirty envelope with no return address, and it was scrawled on neon orange paper. It was signed “Berkeley Baby.” It would never have made it past the New York Times mailroom after the anthrax scare.
    The letter writer turned out to have been the night rewrite editor on the metro desk at the New York Times before he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in the mid-1970s. Since then, he had adopted the name Berkeley Baby and lived on the streets of Berkeley, California, near the university, a forlorn, sad figure not unlike the Phantom of Fine Hall.
    He wrote, “John Nash’s story gives me hope that one day the world will come back to me too.”
    The world came back to John Nash after more than thirty years, and it was the third act of his life that drew me to his story in the first place. In the early 1990s, I was an economics reporter at the New York Times . I was interviewing a Princeton professor about some trade statistics when he mentioned a rumor that a “crazy mathematician” who hung around the math building might be on the short list for a Nobel prize in economics. “You don’t mean the Nash of the Nash equilibrium?” I asked. He told me to call a couple of people in the math department to learn more. By the time I put down the phone, I realized that this was a fairy tale, Greek myth, and Shakespearean tragedy rolled into one.
    I didn’t write the story immediately. Lots of people wind up on short lists for the Nobel and never win, so writing about him in a newspaper would have been an invasion of privacy. In any case, someone else got the prize in 1993. The next year, however, I saw Nash’s name in the Nobel announcement. I ran over to my editor to pitch the story and actually made him cry.
    It was a difficult story to get. Nobody who knew any facts was willing to go on the record or even talk to me. Martha Legg, Nash’s sister, finally broke the silence about the nature of the illness that had wrecked his life.
    Lloyd Shapley, another pioneer of game theory, described Nash as a graduate student in the late 1940s, when he wrote his seminal papers on game theory: “He was immature, he was obnoxious, he was a brat. What redeemed him was a keen, logical, beautiful mind.
    So now you know to whom I owe the title of the biography.
    Because Nash’s story is so familiar, I’d like to share some of the less familiar parts, including how the book came to be and some of the things that happened after the book and movie broke off.
    In June 1995, I found myself in Jerusalem. By then, I had written a book proposal, gotten a publisher, and was about to spend a year at the Institute for Advanced Study. Unfortunately, I’d never met my subject or exchanged more than a few words with him on the phone. When I found out that Nash was going to a game theory conference in Jerusalem, I thought I’d go too.
    Some will remember what Nash said about John von Neumann, who had given him some of the worst advice ever given to a doctoral student. Fortunately, Nash had ignored von Neumann’s advice. Unfortunately for me, he had also decided to ignore the advice of many of his friends and supporters to cooperate with his biographer.
    “Dear Mrs. Nasar,” a typical note began. “I have decided to take a position of Swiss neutrality …”
    Everyone knows the phrase “It takes a village.” It had taken someone weeks of dogged reporting to put together a six-line CV and a short list of Nash’s publications. It took hundreds of sources to piece together his whole story. No single individual, not even Alicia or his sons, knew the whole story.
    It turned out to be possible to stitch