A Beautiful Whine Over Story of Nash’s Genius

The Hollywood community is aghast, we are told.

In their lust for Oscars, movie execs have hit new lows, shamelessly promoting their own movies while unscrupulously smearing the competition and spending obscene piles of cash to influence judges.

I’m shocked too. I’m shocked anyone is surprised.

Much of the cat fighting, as you know, has centered on criticism of “A Beautiful Mind,” which may win the Oscar for best picture tonight. Critics say the movie, based on Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash, ignored unflattering aspects of his life.

I see it entirely differently. My problem is that the movie ignored a flattering aspect of his life.

Leaving the theater, I was hesitant to broach the subject with my wife, who is much smarter than I am. The explanation of Nash’s heralded achievement must have sailed right over my head, and surely she’d call me a dope for missing it. But I had to ask.

“Do you have any idea what this guy did to win a Nobel Prize?” I asked.

“Not a clue,” she said.

Now look, I understand it’s just a Hollywood movie, and I certainly didn’t expect to leave the Cineplex with a PhD. But if you’re going to call a movie “A Beautiful Mind,” why treat viewers like airheads?

If Nash, a schizophrenic, hadn’t won the Nobel Prize, there wouldn’t have been a movie. So couldn’t Universal Pictures take a minute or two, somewhere in the film, to let us in on what Nash did?

“It’s even worse than that,” says Bart Kosko, a professor of electrical engineering at USC. “To the extent that they did try to explain it, they got it wrong.”

I called Kosko because he had written a commentary on the movie for The Times. In the scene he’s talking about, the Nash character, played by Russell Crowe, is in a bar with his pals, and they’re all aflutter over a lone blond in the company of several brunets.

A lightbulb flashes for Crowe. He tells his pals they should forget the blond and go after the brunets, or they’ll all sleep alone.

Let me tell you something. If that were such a smart move, I’d have a few Nobel Prizes on my wall too.

With Kosko’s help and a bit of my own research, I learned that Nash’s 1950 breakthrough was to advance “game theory,” and to this day his insight is used in economic strategizing.

The Nash equilibrium is the point at which no player would alter his own strategy given what the other players are doing, because there’s no incentive to do so.

But in the movie bar scene, there would be an incentive to alter the strategy. If each guy ended up with a brunet, and the neglected blond started batting her eyelashes, the result could be a brawl. This might give us a Hank Williams song, but not a Nash equilibrium.

Not that Hank Williams shouldn’t have won a Nobel Prize.

Nash’s theory has influenced everything from the arms race to the varying prices you pay for a banana at Costco, Ralphs and the corner grocery.

So why couldn’t the movie, especially one up for best picture, trust our intelligence enough to tell us this?

When a Universal publicist heard I was writing about “A Beautiful Mind,” she called to see if she could help with anything.

Did you see the movie? I asked.

Yes, she said.

Then tell me what the Nash equilibrium is.

She paused.

“I’m not going to let you put me on the spot like that,” she said.

David Bayer, a Barnard College mathematician, was Crowe’s “hand double” for the math equations that were scribbled on walls and windows in the movie. I’d read a story that said Bayer was also a consultant to director Ron Howard, so I called him.

“Ron always made it clear this was not a math lesson, it was a love story,” said Bayer.

Well, fine, but I wasn’t looking for a math lesson. A brief explanation of the man’s genius would have been enough for me, and it would have made the movie better.

Bayer said he and Howard “talked at great lengths” about the Nash equilibrium. But Howard was more interested in conveying the emotional intensity of a mathematician, along with an exploration of schizophrenia. Bayer, who loved the movie, thought Howard made all the right moves.

The scene with the blond and brunets wasn’t intended as an explanation of the Nash equilibrium, Bayer says. It was to be seen as the genesis of his breakthrough.

Well, how were we supposed to know? And how could it have meant anything if we never learned what the breakthrough was?

Late in the movie, Nash is honored by his colleagues at Princeton University. The filmmakers could have added a scene--30 seconds would have done it--in which other mathematicians explained the Nash equilibrium in the moments before Nash walked into the reception.

Bayer, who played one of the professors in the room, loved my idea. But it wouldn’t have been historically accurate, he said.

Something tells me that wouldn’t have been a problem.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez @latimes.com.