This biography analyzes how Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash's eccentric personality helped him to develop revolutionary mathematical processes, and chronicles the transformation of this prolific eccentricity into a 30-year bout of paranoid schizophrenia and eventual recovery in 1990. Nasar provides insights into this illness and its devastating effects through Nash's letters, interviews with his colleagues, and her own compilation of research in the field. A New York Times Notable Book for 1998.