Before Reading 1. Warm-up Questions 2. Nobel Prizes Alfred Bernhard Nobel 3. Game Theory 4. A Beautiful Mind 5. Background Information Johann Sebastian Bach Carl Friedrich Gauss John von Neumann Robert Lowell Harlow Shapley
Warm-up Questions Directions: Listen to the recording and then think over the following questions. John Nash mathematician, receiving a Nobel Prize in 1994 for his 1950 dissertation on game theory
1. Can you guess the meaning of “what makes them tick”? what makes sb. tick: the thoughts, feelings, opinions, etc. that give someone their character or make them behave in a particular way For example: I’ve never really understood what makes her tick. 2. What are the two great mysteries of human mind the speaker talks about in John Nash’s case? Genius and madness. 3. What made John Nash win the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1994? His graduate paper that became a pillar of game theory.
4. What was strange about John Nash when he was a little boy? He was totally un-into sport. 5. What kind of ability does John Nash have when he is faced with a mathematical problem? His particular kind of mathematical genius was that he saw the vision first.
In this unit we will look at scientists and what makes them tick. Our two texts tell the stories of two scientists, one American, the other English. Let’s hear a little before we start about the first of the two, the American. The story of mathematician John Nash concerns two great mysteries of the human mind — genius and madness. In 1949 Nash was a graduate student in mathematics at Princeton when he wrote a paper that became a pillar of game theory. In 1994 it earned him the Nobel Prize for Economics. The 45 years between those two events were marked by a brilliant career in the field of mathematics, and by a struggle with schizophrenia (n. 精神分裂症) that led to some hospitalization. Nash did his work on game theory as a graduate student. He then went on to MIT to become a member of its mathematics faculty. He solved two very, very big problems. And then in 1959, he had a massive psychotic (a. 精神病的) breakdown with paranoid (a. 类偏执 狂的) delusions and at that point he resigned his job.
He fled to Europe. He tried to give up his citizenship. He disappeared from the academic scene only to eventually come back to Princeton where he was a kind of or almost a street person who was being sheltered by his ex-wife. Nash was a very strange kid. Someone who contacted me recently told me this very striking image of Nash. He was never admitted into any softball team because he was totally un-into sports. However, if you were a boy you had to be into sports. And this image of Nash stuck out in the right outfield looking up at the clouds, eating grass and just all there by himself. Nash’s particular mathematical genius was the kind that saw the vision first. In other words, not very long after he started thinking about a problem, he would have a very clear vision of where the solution lay. Although he wouldn’t know how to get to it, and it might take a year or two to get there, he had this vision.
And he’s not alone in that. There are other great intuitionists who thought in that way and whose thinking processes were very mysterious to other mathematicians. People said to me that even after they studied Nash’s papers, the leaps of logic were so great and so original that they couldn’t really quite fathom (vt. 弄清楚) how he went from his starting premise to the solution.
Nobel Prizes 1. Fill in the blanks. annual monetary individuals Nobel prizes are _______ awards granted to ______________ for outstanding contributions in the fields or institutions _______, _____________ physics chemistry physiology or medicine literature of, economics _____ peace , , ____ and. The _____ prestigious. Nobel prizes are internationally recognized as the most awards in each industrialist Swedish inventor andof these fields. ______________ The prizes were established by Nobel, who set up a fund for them in his will. fifth anniversaryprizes The first Nobel ________ were awarded on December 10, 1901, the of Nobel’s death. diploma physics and chemistry medicine or physiology literature peace economics
2. Questions and answers 1) In what occasion may the prize go unawarded? A prize may go unawarded if no candidate is chosen for the year under consideration. 2) What about the prize amounts? The prize amounts are based on the annual yield of the fund capital. 3) How are the prizes presented each year? The prizes are presented annually at ceremonies in Stockholm, Sweden, and in Oslo, Norway, on December 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death.
Nobel prizes are annual monetary awards granted to individuals or institutions for outstanding contributions in the fields of physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, peace and economics. The Nobel prizes are internationally recognized as the most prestigious awards in each of these fields. The prizes were established by Swedish inventor and industrialist Nobel, who set up a fund for them in his will. The first Nobel prizes were awarded on December 10, 1901, the fifth anniversary of Nobel’s death. A prize for achievement in a particular field may be awarded to an individual, divided equally between two people, or awarded jointly to two or three people. According to the Nobel Foundation’s statutes, the prize cannot be divided among more than three people, but it can go to an institution. A prize may go unawarded if no candidate is chosen for the year under consideration, but each of the prizes must be awarded at least once every five years.
If the Nobel Foundation does not award a prize in a given year, the prize money remains in the trust. Likewise, if a prize is declined or not accepted before a specified date, the Nobel Foundation retains the prize money in its trust. The prize amounts are based on the annual yield of the fund capital. In 1948 Nobel prizes were about $32, 000 each; in 1997 they were about $1 million each. In addition to a cash award, each prizewinner also receives a gold medal and a diploma bearing the winner’s name and field of achievement. Prizewinners are known as Nobel laureates. The prizes are presented annually at ceremonies in Stockholm, Sweden, and in Oslo, Norway, on December 10 th, the anniversary of Nobel’s death. In Stockholm, the king of Sweden presents the awards in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and economic sciences. The peace prize ceremony takes place at the University of Oslo in the presence of the king of Norway.
After the ceremonies, Nobel prize winners give a lecture on a subject connected with their prize-winning work. The winner of the peace prize lectures in Oslo, the others in Stockholm. The lectures are later printed in the Nobel Foundation’s annual publication, Les Prix Nobel (The Nobel Prizes).
Alfred Bernhard Nobel (1833 -1896) Swedish chemist, inventor, industrialist, and philanthropist His Life His Achievements
His Life Directions: Listen to the recording and number the following events. 1. Being born in Stockholm 2. Education in Saint Petersburg, Russia 3. Education in the United States 4. Working in Saint Petersburg under his father Being born in Stockholm Working in Saint Petersburg under his father Education in the United States Education in Saint Petersburg, Russia
His Achievements Directions: Listen to the passage again and find out Nobel’s achievements. ________________ He produced what he called dynamite. ________________ The founder of Nobel Prize.
Alfred Bernhard Nobel (1833 -1896), Swedish chemist, inventor, and philanthropist, was born in Stockholm. After receiving an education in Saint Petersburg, Russia, and in the United States, where he studied mechanical engineering, he returned to Saint Petersburg to work under his father, developing mines, torpedoes, and other explosives. In a family-owned factory in Heleneborg, Sweden, he sought to develop a safe way to handle nitroglycerin. A factory explosion in 1864 killed his younger brother and four other people. In 1867 Nobel achieved his goal. By using an organic packing material to reduce the volatility of the nitroglycerin, he produced what he called dynamite. He later produced ballistite, one of the first smokeless powders. At the time of his death he controlled factories for the manufacture of explosives in many parts of the world. His will provided that the major portion of his $9 million estate be set up as a fund to establish yearly prizes for merit in physics, chemistry, medicine and physiology, literature, and world peace. (The prize in economics has been awarded since 1969. )
Game Theory Game theory is the mathematical analysis of any situation involving a conflict of interest, with the intent of indicating the optimal choices that, under given conditions, will lead to a desired outcome. Although game theory has roots in the study of such well-known amusements as checkers, ticktacktoe, and poker — hence the name — it also involves serious conflicts of interest arising in such fields as sociology, economics, and political and military science.
A Beautiful Mind Sylvia Nasar’s biography of John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, has become a New York Times best seller. As a mathematical genius, he made an astonishing discovery early in his career and stood on the brink of international acclaim. But the handsome and arrogant Nash soon found himself on a painful and harrowing journey of selfdiscovery once he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. After many years of struggle, he eventually triumphed over this tragedy, and finally, received the Nobel Prize late in life.
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 -1750): Johann Sebastian Bach was a German organist and composer of the baroque era and one of the greatest and most productive geniuses in the history of Western music.
Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777 -1855): Carl Friedrich Gauss was the German mathematician and astronomer and he is noted for his wide-ranging contributions to physics, particularly the study of electromagnetism.
John von Neumann (1903 -1957): John von Neumann was the Hungarian-American mathematician who developed the branch of mathematics known as game theory.
Robert Lowell (1917 -1977): He was a US poet who won Pulitzer Prizes for two books of poems, Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) and The Dolphin (1973). His other collections include Life Studies (1959), For the Union Dead (1964) and Day by Day (1977). Lowell used “confessional poetry” to write about his problems and his unhappy marriages. He also wrote plays and translated the works of European poets.
Harlow Shapley (1885 -1972): Harlow Shapley was the American astronomer, known for his study of the galaxy.
Global Reading 1. Part Division of the Text 2. Group Work 3. Text Analysis 4. Further Understanding For Part 1 -3 Scanning For Part 4 -6 Retell the Story
Part Division of the Text Parts Paragraphs Main Ideas A brief summary of Nash’s achievements and the progress of his illness Nash as a genius student before he went to Princeton 1 1~12 2 13~18 3 19~27 Nash’s brilliant achievements 4 29~34 Nash’s illness 5 35~39 Nash’s being taken care of by the various people around him 6 40~47 Nash’s recovery from illness
Group Work Directions: Discuss the following questions. 1. What do you think is the significance of the Nobel prize awarded to Nash? 2. Do you think the title of the text the best possible title? Why or why not? Can you offer some alternative titles? The text is about Nash’s life so far, not just his lost years. 3. Tell what you know about some famous scientists in the past and present times. 4. What do you think makes a true scientist? Confidence, determination, perseverance, imagination, genius…
Text Analysis 1. Of the four types of writing — description, narration, exposition, and argumentation — which type do you think the text belongs to? Narration. 2. The essay is about the life story of John Nash told mostly in a chronological way. Describe how the writer indicates the time sequence and pieces together the whole story. From the second part on, the writer uses subheadings to show readers the different stages of Nash’s life chronologically.
3. Though written chronologically, the beginning of the essay, however, deals with something that happened quite recently. What kind of rhetorical device is this? Why does the author use it? This device is called flashback. The writer is well aware that winning a Nobel prize should be a great event to anyone. To mention it before anything else will certainly attract the readers’ attention the moment they begin to read the story.
Scanning Table Completion Scan the first three parts of the text and complete the table below by finding out the remarks by others towards John Nash. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 America’s brilliant young star of the “new mathematics” John was always looking for a different way to do things. He could see ways to solve problems that were different from his teacher’s. genius a young Gauss It wasn’t until Nash that game theory came alive for economists. “astonishing” and “dazzling”
Retell the Story Retell what happened in Parts 4~6 according to the following time list. _____ mid-1950’s ____ 1957 ______ the fall of 1958 ________ the spring of 1959 _____ the 1970’s ____ 1963 ____ 1994 the next 20 years _______
The story of John Nash, the Nobel Laureate in economics, has become widely known in recent years through the film of his life, “A Beautiful Mind”. Beautiful it may have been, but it had its darker side. Spectacular early success was followed almost immediately by years of illness as he was plunged into madness. Happily this was not to be the end of the story, as Sylvia Nasar relates.
The Lost Years of a Nobel Laureate Sylvia Nasar Several weeks before the 1994 Nobel prize in economics was announced on October 11, two mathematicians — Harold W. Kuhn and John Forbes Nash, Jr. — visited their old teacher, Albert W. Tucker, now almost 90 and bedridden, at Meadow Lakes, a nursing home near here.
Mr. Nash hadn’t spoken with his mentor in several years. Their hour-long conversation, from which Mr. Kuhn excused himself, concerned number theory. When Mr. Nash stepped out of the room, Mr. Kuhn returned to tell Mr. Tucker a stunning secret: Unbeknownst to Mr. Nash, the Royal Swedish Academy intended to grant Mr. Nash a Nobel for work he had done as the old man’s student in 1949, work that turned out to have revolutionary implications for economics. The award was a miracle. It wasn’t just that Mr. Nash, one of the mathematical geniuses of the postwar era, was finally getting the recognition he deserved. Nor that he was being honored for a slender 27 -page Ph. D. thesis written almost half a century ago at the tender age of 21.
The real miracle was that the 66 -year-old Mr. Nash — tall, gray, with sad eyes and the soft, raspy voice of someone who doesn’t talk much — was alive and well enough to receive the prize. For John Nash was stricken with paranoid schizophrenia more than three decades earlier. Mr. Nash’s terrible illness was an open secret among mathematicians and economists. No sooner had Fortune magazine singled him out in July 1958 as America’s brilliant young star of the “new mathematics” than the disease had devastated Mr. Nash’s personal and professional life. He hadn’t published a scientific paper since 1958. He hadn’t held an academic post since 1959. Many people had heard, incorrectly, that he had a lobotomy. Others, mainly those outside Princeton, simply assumed that he was dead.
He didn’t die, but his life, once so full of brightness and promise, became hellish. There were repeated commitments to psychiatric hospitals. Failed treatments. Fearful delusions. A period of wandering around Europe. Stretches in Roanoke, Va. , where Mr. Nash’s mother and sister lived. Finally, a return to Princeton, where he had once been the rising star. There he became the Phantom of Fine Hall, a mute figure who scribbled strange equations on blackboards in the mathematics building and searched anxiously for secret messages in numbers. Then, roughly 10 years ago, the awful fires that fed the delusions and distorted his thinking began to die down. It happened very gradually. But, by his mid-50’s, Mr. Nash began to come out of his isolation. He started to talk to other mathematicians again. He began to work on mathematical problems that made sense. He made friends with several graduate students. He didn’t get a job, but he started to learn new things, like using computers for his research.
And here he was at Meadow Lakes. Within a few weeks, Mr. Nash got the early morning telephone call from Stockholm — 45 minutes late, as it turned out — telling him that he was being honored along with two other pioneers of game theory, John C. Harsanyi of the University of California at Berkeley and Reinhard Selten of the University of Bonn. On one level, John Nash’s story is the tragedy of any person with schizophrenia. Incurable, incapacitating and extremely difficult to treat, schizophrenia plays terrifying tricks on its victims. Many people with the disease can no longer sort and interpret sensations or reason or feel the full range of emotions. Instead, they suffer from delusions and hear voices.
But in Mr. Nash’s case, the tragedy has the added dimensions of his early genius — and of the network of family and friends who valued that genius, wrapping themselves protectively around Mr. Nash and providing him with a safe haven while he was ill. There were the former colleagues who tried to get him work. The sister who made heartbreaking choices about his treatment. The loyal wife who stood by him when she no longer was his wife. The economist who argued to the Nobel committee that mental illness shouldn’t be a bar to the prize. Princeton itself. Mr. Nash has never talked about his illness publicly except to refer obliquely, at the news conference announcing his Nobel, to the fact that he had made some irrational choices in the past. He declined to be interviewed for this story, saying, “People know what they know. ”
But many of the people who have been close to him over the years or got to know him in the last few years have been willing, now that he has the extra protection of the mantle of a Nobel prize, to talk about his life and his achievements. Starting Out: The First Signs of Genius John Nash’s West Virginia roots are often invoked by people who knew him at Princeton or at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for a while in the 50’s, to explain his lack of worldliness. But Bluefield, the town where he grew up, was hardly a backwater. It had the highest per capita income in the state during the 30’s and 40’s and was home to a handful of millionaires, the Virginia Southern railroad and a four-year Baptist college.
Mr. Nash’s mother, Margaret, was a Latin teacher. His father, John Sr. , was a gentlemanly electrical engineer. By the time John Jr. and his younger sister were in elementary school, in the middle of the Depression, the Nashes lived in a white frame house, down the street from the country club. Nothing was more important to the senior Nashes than supervising their children’s education, recalls the sister, Martha Nash Legg. John Jr. was a prodigy but not a straight-A student. He read constantly. He played chess. He whistled entire Bach melodies.
“John was always looking for a different way to do things, ” said Mrs. Legg, a tall, handsome woman who is a potter in Roanoke. In elementary school, one of his teachers told John’s mother that her son was having trouble in math. “He could see ways to solve problems that were different from his teacher’s, ” Mrs. Legg said, laughing. In the fall of 1945, Mr. Nash enrolled at Carnegie-Mellon, then Carnegie Tech, in Pittsburgh. It was there that the label “genius” was first applied to Mr. Nash. His mathematics professor called him “a young Gauss” in class one day, referring to the great German mathematician. Mr. Nash switched from chemistry to math in his freshman year. Two years later he had a B. S. and was studying for an M. S.
His graduate professor, R. J. Duffin, recalls Mr. Nash as a tall, slightly awkward student who came to him one day and described a problem he thought he had solved. Professor Duffin realized with some astonishment that Mr. Nash, without knowing it, had independently proved Brouwer’s famed theorem. The professor’s letter of recommendation for Mr. Nash had just one line: “This man is a genius. ” Making Waves: Game Theory and More In 1948, the year Mr. Nash entered the doctoral program at Princeton with a fellowship, the town was arguably the center of the mathematical and scientific universe. It not only had the Institute for Advanced Study and Albert Einstein, but also there was John von Neumann, the charismatic mathematician who helped develop the modern computer as well as the mathematical theory behind the Hbomb.
At once eager to prove himself and somewhat gauche, especially compared with older students who had served in the war, Mr. Nash quickly became one of the brilliant young men who performed mental pyrotechnics in the common room of Fine Hall. Soon after he arrived he invented an extremely clever game that was played with markers on hexagonal bathroom tiles. An instant fad in the common room, it was called “Nash” or “John”. Other students found him a loner, odd as well as brilliant. When he wasn’t in the common room talking a blue streak, he paced. Around around he would go, following Fine Hall’s quadrangular hallways, occasionally dashing into empty classrooms to scribble, with lightning speed, on blackboards.
Mr. Nash’s Nobel-winning thesis on game theory was the product of his second year at Princeton. Game theory was the invention of von Neumann and a Princeton economist named Oskar Morgenstern. Their 1944 book, “The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, ” was the first attempt to derive logical and mathematical rules about rivalries. The Cold War and the nuclear arms race meant that game theory was an idea whose time had arrived. Characteristically, Mr. Nash picked a problem for his thesis that had eluded von Neumann. Briefly, von Neumann only had a good theory for pure rivalries in which one side’s gain was the other’s loss. Mr. Nash focused on rivalries in which mutual gain was also possible. He showed that there were stable solutions — no player could do better given what the others were doing — for such rivalries under a wide variety of circumstances. In doing so, he turned game theory, a beguiling idea, into a powerful tool that economists could use to analyze everything from business competition to trade negotiations. “It wasn’t until Nash that game theory came alive for economists, ” said Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate in economics at M. I. T.
Mr. Nash got his doctorate on his 22 nd birthday, June 13, 1950. After brief interludes as an instructor at Princeton and as a consultant at the Rand Corporation, the Cold War think tank, Mr. Nash moved on to teach at M. I. T. in 1951. He arrived itching to show that he could solve really big problems. According to one story circulating at the time, Mr. Nash was in the common room knocking, as he often did, other mathematicians’ work. An older professor is said to have challenged him to solve one of the field’s most notorious problems. The problem grew out of work done by G. F. B. Riemann, a 19 th century mathematician, and was considered virtually insoluble. But Mr. Nash wound up solving it. To do so, he invented a completely new method for approaching the problem that turned out to unlock a difficulty encountered in a far larger class of problems. Mathematicians still describe the solution as “astonishing” and “dazzling”.
Most mathematicians consider this and other work Mr. Nash did in pure mathematics to be his greatest achievements, worthy of Nobels if such were given in the mathematical field. Many joke that he got his Nobel for his most trivial work. The Disease: “It’s All Over for Him. ” By the mid-1950’s, Mr. Nash was phenomenally productive. When he got tired of mathematicians, he would wander over to the economics department to talk to Mr. Solow and another Nobel laureate, Paul Samuelson. And it was during this period that Mr. Nash met his future wife, Alicia Larde, an El Salvadoran physics student at M. I. T. who took advanced calculus from him. Small, graceful, with extraordinary dark eyes, Alicia looked like an Odile in “Swan Lake. ” “He was very, very good looking, very intelligent, ” Mrs. Nash recalls. “It was a little bit of a hero worship thing. ” They were married in 1957, a year Mr. Nash spent on leave at the Institute for Advanced Study.
By the time the Nashes returned to M. I. T. , John Nash had been awarded tenure. Mrs. Nash went back to graduate school and worked part time in the computer center. In the fall of 1958, she became pregnant with their son, John Charles Martin Nash. “It was a very nice time of my life, ” she recalled. It is just then, when life seemed so very sweet, that John Nash got sick. Within months, at age 30 in the spring of 1959, Mr. Nash was committed to Mc. Lean Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Belmont, Mass. , connected with Harvard University. “Robert Lowell, the manic depressive poet, was also in the hospital, ” said Isador M. Singer, who shared an office with Mr. Nash at M. I. T. , where he is now a professor. “There was Mrs. Nash, sitting there, pregnant as hell. Robert Lowell was sounding forth.
And there was Nash, very quiet and almost not moving. ” He added, “I’ve had that picture in my mind for years. I focused mostly on his wife and the coming child. I remember thinking, ‘It’s all over for him. ’” In the months leading up to his hospitalization, Mr. Nash became another person. He skipped from subject to subject. Some of his lectures no longer made sense. He fled to Roanoke at one point, abandoning his classes. He wrote strange letters to various public figures. The months at Mc. Lean did little to arrest the disease. Mr. Nash’s paranoia intensified and he could no longer work. After resigning his M. I. T. post, he went to Europe, wandering from city to city. Eventually, the Nashes separated and he moved to Roanoke to live with his mother.
The Abyss: Two Decades of Darkness For most of the next 20 years, Mr. Nash divided his time between hospitals, Roanoke and, increasingly, Princeton. In 1963, Mrs. Nash divorced him but eventually let him live at her house. Mr. Nash was hospitalized at least three more times. Mrs. Nash, who never remarried, supported her former husband her son by working as a computer programmer, with some financial help from family, friends and colleagues. “It was a pretty lean life, ” said Martha Legg. Mr. Nash became a sad, ghostly presence around Princeton. “Everyone at Princeton knew him by sight, ” recalls Daniel R. Feenberg, a Princeton graduate student in the 1970’s. “His clothes didn’t quite match. He looked vacant. He was mostly silent. He was around a lot in the library reading books or walking between buildings. ”
Alicia Nash believed very firmly, according to several people close to her, that Mr. Nash should live at home and stay within Princeton’s mathematics community even when he was not functioning well. Martha Legg applauds her decision. “Being in Princeton was good for him, ” said Mrs. Legg. “In a place like Princeton, if you act strange, you’re special. In Roanoke, if you act strange, you’re just different. They didn’t know who he was here. ” Some former colleagues at Princeton and M. I. T. tried to help with jobs on research projects, though very often Mr. Nash couldn’t accept the help. Professor Shapley at U. C. L. A. succeeded in getting a cash mathematics prize for Mr. Nash in the 70’s. There were other forms of kindness, like getting Mr. Nash access to university computers or remembering to invite him to seminars when old friends turned up on campus.
Coming Back Finally, a Remission Still, the people who stayed in regular contact with him eventually came to believe that his illness would never end. Then came what Professor Kuhn calls “a miraculous remission”. And as happens, for reasons unknown, in the case of some people with schizophrenia, it was not, according to Mrs. Nash or Mrs. Legg, due to any drug or treatment. “It’s just a question of living a quiet life, ” said Mrs. Nash. The most dramatic sign of that remission, perhaps, is that Mr. Nash was able to do mathematics again. And now Mr. Nash is a Nobel laureate. The story of his prize is itself testament not only to his survival but to the fierce loyalty and admiration he inspired in others. During the 20 -plus years of Mr. Nash’s illness, game theory flourished and it is hard to find an important article in the field that doesn’t refer to his work.
The reaction to the announcement was jubilation. “The main message to the world is that the academy says mental illness is just like cancer, nothing special, ” said Ariel Rubinstein, a game theorist at Tel Aviv University. “It’s great. ” What will Mr. Nash do now? At 66, he is past the age when most mathematicians do their best work. But the researchers he now talks to say that he is interested in the major unsolved problems. “The truths Nash discovered were all very surprising, ” said Simon Kochen, another Princeton mathematician. “Nash is a man who surprises people. ”
Mr. Nash hadn’t spoken with his mentor in several years. Their hour-long conversation, from which Mr. Kuhn excused himself, concerned number theory. When Mr. Nash stepped out of the room, Mr. Kuhn returned to tell Mr. Tucker a stunning secret: Unbeknownst to Mr. Nash, the Royal Swedish Academy intended to grant Mr. Nash a Nobel for work he had done as the old man’s student in 1949, work that turned out to have revolutionary implications for economics. The award was a miracle. It wasn’t just that Mr. Nash, one of the mathematical geniuses of the postwar era, was finally getting the recognition he deserved. Nor that he was being honored for a slender 27 -page Ph. D. thesis written almost half a century ago at the tender age of 21.
The real miracle was that the 66 -year-old Mr. Nash — tall, gray, with sad eyes and the soft, raspy voice of someone who doesn’t talk much — was alive and well enough to receive the prize. For John Nash was stricken with paranoid schizophrenia more than three decades earlier. Mr. Nash’s terrible illness was an open secret among mathematicians and economists. No sooner had Fortune magazine singled him out in July 1958 as America’s brilliant young star of the “new mathematics” than the disease had devastated Mr. Nash’s personal and professional life. He hadn’t published a scientific paper since 1958. He hadn’t held an academic post since 1959. Many people had heard, incorrectly, that he had a lobotomy. Others, mainly those outside Princeton, simply assumed that he was dead.
He didn’t die, but his life, once so full of brightness and promise, became hellish. There were repeated commitments to psychiatric hospitals. Failed treatments. Fearful delusions. A period of wandering around Europe. Stretches in Roanoke, Va. , where Mr. Nash’s mother and sister lived. Finally, a return to Princeton, where he had once been the rising star. There he became the Phantom of Fine Hall, a mute figure who scribbled strange equations on blackboards in the mathematics building and searched anxiously for secret messages in numbers. Then, roughly 10 years ago, the awful fires that fed the delusions and distorted his thinking began to die down. It happened very gradually. But, by his mid-50’s, Mr. Nash began to come out of his isolation. He started to talk to other mathematicians again. He began to work on mathematical problems that made sense. He made friends with several graduate students. He didn’t get a job, but he started to learn new things, like using computers for his research.
And here he was at Meadow Lakes. Within a few weeks, Mr. Nash got the early morning telephone call from Stockholm — 45 minutes late, as it turned out — telling him that he was being honored along with two other pioneers of game theory, John C. Harsanyi of the University of California at Berkeley and Reinhard Selten of the University of Bonn. On one level, John Nash’s story is the tragedy of any person with schizophrenia. Incurable, incapacitating and extremely difficult to treat, schizophrenia plays terrifying tricks on its victims. Many people with the disease can no longer sort and interpret sensations or reason or feel the full range of emotions. Instead, they suffer from delusions and hear voices.
But in Mr. Nash’s case, the tragedy has the added dimensions of his early genius — and of the network of family and friends who valued that genius, wrapping themselves protectively around Mr. Nash and providing him with a safe haven while he was ill. There were the former colleagues who tried to get him work. The sister who made heartbreaking choices about his treatment. The loyal wife who stood by him when she no longer was his wife. The economist who argued to the Nobel committee that mental illness shouldn’t be a bar to the prize. Princeton itself. Mr. Nash has never talked about his illness publicly except to refer obliquely, at the news conference announcing his Nobel, to the fact that he had made some irrational choices in the past. He declined to be interviewed for this story, saying, “People know what they know. ”
Mr. Nash’s mother, Margaret, was a Latin teacher. His father, John Sr. , was a gentlemanly electrical engineer. By the time John Jr. and his younger sister were in elementary school, in the middle of the Depression, the Nashes lived in a white frame house, down the street from the country club. Nothing was more important to the senior Nashes than supervising their children’s education, recalls the sister, Martha Nash Legg. John Jr. was a prodigy but not a straight-A student. He read constantly. He played chess. He whistled entire Bach melodies.
His graduate professor, R. J. Duffin, recalls Mr. Nash as a tall, slightly awkward student who came to him one day and described a problem he thought he had solved. Professor Duffin realized with some astonishment that Mr. Nash, without knowing it, had independently proved Brouwer’s famed theorem. The professor’s letter of recommendation for Mr. Nash had just one line: “This man is a genius. ” Making Waves: Game Theory and More In 1948, the year Mr. Nash entered the doctoral program at Princeton with a fellowship, the town was arguably the center of the mathematical and scientific universe. It not only had the Institute for Advanced Study and Albert Einstein, but also there was John von Neumann, the charismatic mathematician who helped develop the modern computer as well as the mathematical theory behind the Hbomb.
At once eager to prove himself and somewhat gauche, especially compared with older students who had served in the war, Mr. Nash quickly became one of the brilliant young men who performed mental pyrotechnics in the common room of Fine Hall. Soon after he arrived he invented an extremely clever game that was played with markers on hexagonal bathroom tiles. An instant fad in the common room, it was called “Nash” or “John”. Other students found him a loner, odd as well as brilliant. When he wasn’t in the common room talking a blue streak, he paced. Around around he would go, following Fine Hall’s quadrangular hallways, occasionally dashing into empty classrooms to scribble, with lightning speed, on blackboards.
Mr. Nash’s Nobel-winning thesis on game theory was the product of his second year at Princeton. Game theory was the invention of von Neumann and a Princeton economist named Oskar Morgenstern. Their 1944 book, “The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, ” was the first attempt to derive logical and mathematical rules about rivalries. The Cold War and the nuclear arms race meant that game theory was an idea whose time had arrived. Characteristically, Mr. Nash picked a problem for his thesis that had eluded von Neumann. Briefly, von Neumann only had a good theory for pure rivalries in which one side’s gain was the other’s loss. Mr. Nash focused on rivalries in which mutual gain was also possible. He showed that there were stable solutions — no player could do better given what the others were doing — for such rivalries under a wide variety of circumstances. In doing so, he turned game theory, a beguiling idea, into a powerful tool that economists could use to analyze everything from business competition to trade negotiations. “It wasn’t until Nash that game theory came alive for economists, ” said Robert Solow, a Nobel laureate in economics at M. I. T.
Mr. Nash got his doctorate on his 22 nd birthday, June 13, 1950. After brief interludes as an instructor at Princeton and as a consultant at the Rand Corporation, the Cold War think tank, Mr. Nash moved on to teach at M. I. T. in 1951. He arrived itching to show that he could solve really big problems. According to one story circulating at the time, Mr. Nash was in the common room knocking, as he often did, other mathematicians’ work. An older professor is said to have challenged him to solve one of the field’s most notorious problems. The problem grew out of work done by G. F. B. Riemann, a 19 th century mathematician, and was considered virtually insoluble. But Mr. Nash wound up solving it. To do so, he invented a completely new method for approaching the problem that turned out to unlock a difficulty encountered in a far larger class of problems. Mathematicians still describe the solution as “astonishing” and “dazzling”.
By the time the Nashes returned to M. I. T. , John Nash had been awarded tenure. Mrs. Nash went back to graduate school and worked part time in the computer center. In the fall of 1958, she became pregnant with their son, John Charles Martin Nash. “It was a very nice time of my life, ” she recalled. It is just then, when life seemed so very sweet, that John Nash got sick. Within months, at age 30 in the spring of 1959, Mr. Nash was committed to Mc. Lean Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Belmont, Mass. , connected with Harvard University. “Robert Lowell, the manic depressive poet, was also in the hospital, ” said Isador M. Singer, who shared an office with Mr. Nash at M. I. T. , where he is now a professor. “There was Mrs. Nash, sitting there, pregnant as hell. Robert Lowell was sounding forth.
And there was Nash, very quiet and almost not moving. ” He added, “I’ve had that picture in my mind for years. I focused mostly on his wife and the coming child. I remember thinking, ‘It’s all over for him. ’” In the months leading up to his hospitalization, Mr. Nash became another person. He skipped from subject to subject. Some of his lectures no longer made sense. He fled to Roanoke at one point, abandoning his classes. He wrote strange letters to various public figures. The months at Mc. Lean did little to arrest the disease. Mr. Nash’s paranoia intensified and he could no longer work. After resigning his M. I. T. post, he went to Europe, wandering from city to city. Eventually, the Nashes separated and he moved to Roanoke to live with his mother.
The Abyss: Two Decades of Darkness For most of the next 20 years, Mr. Nash divided his time between hospitals, Roanoke and, increasingly, Princeton. In 1963, Mrs. Nash divorced him but eventually let him live at her house. Mr. Nash was hospitalized at least three more times. Mrs. Nash, who never remarried, supported her former husband her son by working as a computer programmer, with some financial help from family, friends and colleagues. “It was a pretty lean life, ” said Martha Legg. Mr. Nash became a sad, ghostly presence around Princeton. “Everyone at Princeton knew him by sight, ” recalls Daniel R. Feenberg, a Princeton graduate student in the 1970’s. “His clothes didn’t quite match. He looked vacant. He was mostly silent. He was around a lot in the library reading books or walking between buildings. ”
Alicia Nash believed very firmly, according to several people close to her, that Mr. Nash should live at home and stay within Princeton’s mathematics community even when he was not functioning well. Martha Legg applauds her decision. “Being in Princeton was good for him, ” said Mrs. Legg. “In a place like Princeton, if you act strange, you’re special. In Roanoke, if you act strange, you’re just different. They didn’t know who he was here. ” Some former colleagues at Princeton and M. I. T. tried to help with jobs on research projects, though very often Mr. Nash couldn’t accept the help. Professor Shapley at U. C. L. A. succeeded in getting a cash mathematics prize for Mr. Nash in the 70’s. There were other forms of kindness, like getting Mr. Nash access to university computers or remembering to invite him to seminars when old friends turned up on campus.
1. Why was the reward a miracle? Because Nash had got a serious disease. 2. Analyze the structure of the sentence. It wasn’t just that… Nor that… 这不仅仅因为…… 也不是因为…… 3. Translate the sentence into Chinese. 这次授奖堪称奇迹。这不仅仅因为作为战后的一位数学天才，纳什先生终 于获得了应有的赞誉。也不是因为他是由于几乎半个世纪前才21岁时写 的薄薄一篇27页的博士论文而获此殊荣。
Paraphrase the sentence. As soon as Fortune magazine chose him as America’s brilliant young star of the “new mathematics”, Mr. Nash’s personal and professional life was destroyed by the disease.
1. What does the phrase “on one level” mean? “On / at one level (on / at another level)” is used when speaking about two opposite ways of thinking about something. 2. What is “on another level”? His early genius.
1. Analyze the type of the sentences. All these sentences are elliptical sentences. “There was” is omitted before each sentence. 2. What can we learn from the sentences? To some extent, Nash was lucky because the family and friends took good care of him, so later he could recover unexpectedly.
Why did Nash say so? Open-ended.
What can we infer from the sentence? Most places of the West Virginia are stagnant and people from there seem to lack communication skills.
1. Paraphrase the first part of the sentence. It is most important for the senior Nashes to guide their children’s studies. 2. What’s the meaning of “straight-A”? Excellent.
1. Translate the sentence into Chinese. 简言之，冯 • 诺伊曼仅仅有关于纯粹竞争行为的很好理论，认为彼输即是 我赢。纳什先生着重论述了也有双赢可能的竞争行为。 2. Have you ever heard theory? What do you think about it? Open-ended.
What can we infer from the sentence? Alicia regarded Nash as someone outstanding and this played its part in attracting her towards him.
1. What’s the use of the prize towards Nash? It serves as the evidence both of his strong vitality and of respect and faithfulness from others. 2. What’s the social significance of the prize? It proves that mental illness is just like cancer, nothing special.
award: 1. n. sth. such as a prize or money given to sb. to reward them for sth. they have done I am very happy although I wonder if it is ok to be given this big award. 她获奖以后, 渐渐有点骄傲了。 She’s been getting a bit above herself since winning her award. 2. vt. officially give sb. sth. such as a prize or money to reward them for sth. they have done Emmy is a statuette awarded annually by the academy of Television Arts and Sciences for outstanding achievements in television. She was awarded a place at the Royal College of Music.
single out: choose one person or thing from among a group because they are better, worse, more important, etc. than the others The team was singled out as the best in the province. The president singles out Prof. Smith for special praise.
devastate: vt. damage sth. very badly or completely The enemy had systematically devastated wide regions. In 1945, all mankind came to know and fear the nucleus when the fission of 1 kg of uranium devastated Hiroshima.
hellish: adj. extremely difficult or bad The hellish noise, the roaring and swearing, joined to make the place seem a hell itself. 一开始他的学校生活就像在地狱一样。 His schooldays were hellish at the very beginning.
delusion: n. a false belief about yourself or the situation you are in He labors under the delusion that he’s a fine actor. His arguments sound convincing, but they’re based on delusion. 我始终认为，承认现实，不沉迷于幻想，是一种可贵的品格。 I have always thought it was a most valuable trait to recognize reality and not to pursue delusions.
scribble: v. write sth. quickly and untidily 她迅速而潦草地写着，拼错了一个词后又把它划掉。 She scribbled something hastily, misspelling a word and crossing it out again. While he had been sitting at the desk scribbling, the light of morning had established itself so unequivocally in the hotel bedroom.
distort: vt. 1) report sth. in a way that is not completely true or correct I am sorry that I have distorted your motives. That newspaper’s accounts of international affairs are sometimes distorted. 政府由于有计划地歪曲抗议者的观点而受到非难. The government was accused of having systematically distorted the protesters’ case. 2) change the appearance, sound, or shape of sth. so that it is strange or unclear The announcement was so distorted that I couldn’t understand what was said.
CF: distort, twist & deform 这三个词都是动词，都表示“变化或损坏某物的外形或特征”。 distort 指通过扭转或扭伤来改变形状；该词也可用来指对说的话或绘画 的曲解和对某物意义的歪曲。例如： The human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it. 人的理解如同一面假镜子，无规律地接收光线，将自己的本质和事物的本 质混淆起来，从而歪曲和玷污了事物的本质 twist 指通过转动、拧或扭而使某物成弯曲状，也可用于指对外形的扭 曲或对事物意义的歪曲。例如： We twisted the bed sheets into a rope and escaped by climbing down it. 我们把床单搓成绳子, 靠沿着绳子往下爬逃跑的。
He accused me of twisting his words to mean what I wanted them to. 他指责我随心所欲地歪曲了他的话。 deform 指使（某物）变形，常含有失去优秀品质（如美丽、善良等）的意思。 例如： Great erosion deformed the landscape. 巨大的侵蚀改变了地貌。
die down: become gradually less strong, active, violent, loud, noticeable, etc. The plants die down each winter in the north but bloom from new wood the next season. 他以为他的声明招来的批评会慢慢地平息下来。 He thought that the criticism that had followed his announcement would die down Collocations: die back die off die out 枝叶枯萎 相继死亡 灭绝
play tricks on: confuse sb. or cause problem for them One night, my two buddies and I decided to play a trick on Fred. 约翰在游泳时，别的小孩跟他开玩笑，把他的衣服藏起来，惹得他大 发脾气。 John got very angry when the other boys played a trick on him and his clothes while he was swimming.
sensation: n. feeling that you get from one of your five senses, especially the sense of touch The anticipation produced in me a sensation somewhat between happiness and fear. 我觉得有人监视着我。 I had the sensation that I was being watched. CF: feeling, sensation, sense & perception 这四个词都是名词，均含“感觉”之意。 feeling 最普通用词，既可指身体上的感觉，如冷暖、饥饿、疼痛等， 又可指精神上的感觉，如喜、怒、哀、乐、失望等。例如： I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. 我曾经说过诗是强烈感情的自然流露。
A certain feeling overpowered him, which was strong and incomprehensible, even to himself. 一种古怪的，连他自己也弄不明白的感觉揪住了他的心。 sensation 为较严密的科学用词，指听觉、味觉、视觉、嗅觉或触觉； 还可指引起激动或轰动的事物。例如： Some sensation is coming back to my arm. 我的胳膊逐渐恢复了一点知觉。 The news caused a great sensation. 这个消息十分轰动。 sense 主要指人或动物的感觉。它的复数形式指人的知觉。例如： I never had a sense of abundance, of being able to splash out and enjoy myself. 我从没有富足的感觉，从不敢大方花钱，享受自我。
He is a person with no sense of direction, so he often loses his way. 他没有什么方向感，所以经常迷路。 perception 侧重对外界刺激的反应和对产生感觉的物体的辨别。例如： Education is not only for the improvement of the individual, but also serves society by providing a group of men of understanding, of perception and wisdom. 教育不仅能提高个人的修养，它还能为社会造就一批具有理解力、洞察力 和智慧的人。
dimension: n. 1) a part of a situation or a quality involved in it There is a dimension to the problem that we have not discussed. The arrival of the South African team has brought a new dimension to the competition. 2) the length, height, width, depth, or diameter of sth. Suppose that in general, the ball is seen at a random angle in three dimensions, rather than two.
loyal: adj. always supporting your friends, principles, country, etc. Many of the party’s loyal supporters have begun to question his leadership. The national guard remained loyal to the government. NB: 该词的反义词是disloyal.
supervise: v. be in charge of an activity or a person, and make sure that things are done in the correct way The teacher’s duties that morning included supervising the before-school reading program. Tutors would supervise their students’ work in the manner of teacher trainers. CF: supervise, administer, govern & manage 这三个词都是动词，都有“管理、支配”之意。 supervise 侧重指运用本身的或被授予的权力来管理、检查 作，含有“ 监督”的意思。 All volunteers are supervised by a qualified nurse. 所有的志愿者都由一个专业的护士来监督。 administer 指官方的或正式的对事务的管理。 The money will be administered by local charities. 这笔钱将由地方上的慈善机构来管理。
govern 侧重指运用权力来统治或管理一个国家、一个社会或一个部门， 暗含能力和知识的运用。 The party had been governing for seven months. 这个政党已经执政七个月了。 manage 强调对具体事务机构进行管理，有时含受权管理或处理之意。 Kerry has been asked to manage a new department. 凯瑞被指派去管理一个新的部门。 Directions: Fill in the blanks with the four words above. Change the form where necessary. 1. In Britain the Queen reigns, but the elected representatives of the people govern the country. ________ 2. Jones manages the finances here. ____ 3. It was the captain’s job to administer punishment on the ship. 4. The court said that schools do not have a duty to supervise ____ the students at all times.
awkward: adj. 1) lacking ease or grace (as of movement or expression) I was always an awkward dancer. Swans are surprisingly awkward on land. 2) difficult to do, use or deal with A good carpenter can make a cupboard to fit the most awkward space. 3) making you feel embarrassed so that you are not sure what to do or say There was an awkward moment when she didn’t know whether to shake his hand or kiss his cheek. 我意识到了他们想要单独在一起, 所以觉得很尴尬。 I realized they wanted to be alone together so I felt very awkward.
CF: awkward & clumsy 这两个词都是形容词，都含有“笨拙的”之意。 awkward 侧重缺乏优雅、机敏和技巧。用于修饰物体时，指使用不便。 例如： It’ll be awkward getting cars in and out of the garage. 很难将车子开进开出这车库。 It’s an awkward door — you have to bend down to go through it. 这扇门很不方便 —— 得弯着腰才能过去。 clumsy 指人时，侧重指行动笨拙；指物时，侧重指制作粗陋或由于体 积、重量过大而显得笨重。例如： You clumsy fellow — that’s the second glass you’ve broken today! 你这个笨家伙 —— 这是你今天打碎的第二个玻璃杯！ It’s not easy walking in these clumsy shoes. 穿着这双笨重的鞋走路真难受。
fellowship: n. 1) (especially American English) money given to a student to allow them to continue their studies at an advanced level She has been awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University. We give three research fellowships a year. 2) a feeling of friendship resulting from shared interests or experiences Regular outings contribute to a sense of fellowship among coworkers. Who can resist the message of warmth and good fellowship?
fad: n. sth. that people like or do for a short time, or that is fashionable for a short time Interest in organic food is not a fad; it’s here to stay. 汤姆还会继续集邮吗？还是已经没有热情了？ Will Tom continue to collect stamps or is it only a passing fad?
rivalry: n. a situation in which two or more people, teams, or companies are competing for sth. , especially over a long period of time, and the feeling of competition between them Traditional friendships and rivalries played at least as important a part in this process as purely financial considerations.
elude: vt. 1) if a fact or the answer to a problem eludes you, you cannot remember or solve it The exact terminology eludes me for the moment. 我认得她的脸, 但想不起她的名字了。 I recognize her face, but her name eludes me. 2) escape from sb. or sth. , especially by tricking them He managed to elude his pursuers by hiding underground.
negotiation: n. official discussions between the representatives of opposing groups who are trying to reach an agreement, especially in business or politics A settlement was reached after lengthy negotiations. 价格是可以商议的。 The price is a matter of / for negotiation / open to negotiation. The negotiations with the company had reached a crucial stage. Collocations: be in negotiation with sb. enter into / open / carry on / resume negotiations with sb. negotiation between… negotiation on / over… 与某人商议 与某人着手/展开/进行/恢 复谈判 ……之间的谈判 就……进行协商
come alive: if a subject or event comes alive, it becomes real or interesting When he finally added the eye lines, the Buddha seemed to come alive 课本里那连篇的干巴巴的战争，一下了都活生生地呈现在他的眼前了。 The long dry battles of the textbooks come alive for him at once.
interlude: n. a period of time between two events or situations, during which sth. different happens Halfway through the performance, there was a short musical interlude. The dance provided a delightful comic interlude.
itch: 1. v. 1) want to do sth. very much and as soon as possible I positively itched to grab the oars and row, row. It was something that Mike itched to do — perhaps only because he knew it was impossible. Patterns: be itching to do sth. be itching for sth. 2) if part of your body or your clothes itch, you have an unpleasant feeling on your skin that makes you want to rub it with your nails Scratch yourself if you itch! 蚊子咬的地方还痒吗？ Are your mosquito bites still itching?
2. n. 1) an uncomfortable feeling on your skin that makes you want to rub it with your nails Scratch my back — I have an itch. 2) a strong desire to do or have sth. She cannot resist the / her itch to travel. Collocations: have an itch for 身体某个地方痒 渴望
circulate: v. 1) if information, facts, ideas, etc. circulate, they become known by many people 谣言开始流传，说总理病得很重。 Rumors began circulating that the Prime Minister was seriously ill. The group circulated petitions calling for a federal law to ban handguns. 2) move around within a system, or make sth. do this Swimming helps to get the blood circulating through the muscles. Ceiling fans circulated warm air around the room.
notorious: adj. famous or well-known for sth. bad This portrait of self-destruction is told through the contrast of two singing sisters, one famous and one notorious. The hotels are notorious for their low rates of pay.
wind up: bring an activity, meeting, etc. to an end OK, just to wind up, could I summarize what we’ve decided? 该结束了 —— 我要赶飞机。 It’s time to wind things up — I have a plane to catch.
astonishing: adj. so surprising that is difficult to believe Their album has sold an astonishing 11 million copies. It has been an astonishing transformation in opinions and attitudes within the course of a few short weeks. What is even more astonishing is that you can see the Wellestream more easily with every passing year.
pregnant adj. if a woman or female animal is pregnant, she has an unborn baby growing inside her body She’s about five months pregnant. By this time I had been heavily pregnant and could hardly get into any of my clothes.
depressive adj. relating to or suffering from depression Indeed, depressive traits are more in evidence than paranoid tendencies. Many young people are struggling with a depressive illness that requires medical treatment.
intensify: v. increase in degree or strength, or make sth. do this The latest merger will intensify competition among defense companies. 新闻界已增强了对该候选人背景的调查。 The press has intensified its scrutiny of the candidate’s background. The dizzy feeling in her head intensified, and she knew she was about to black out.
abyss: n. a deep empty hole in the ground; a very big difference that separates two people or groups Bushnell stood on the rim of the canyon, with the rocky abyss behind him. The economic abyss between developed and undeveloped countries is widening.
hospitalize: v. if someone is hospitalized, they are taken into a hospital for treatment Roger was hospitalized after a severe asthma attack. 他的小女儿因抑郁症住院了。 His little daughter’s been hospitalized for depression.
know by sight: recognize sb. without knowing him personally or without knowing his name Some of the assistants came to know me by sight as I visited the store so often. 他们都认识，但各有各的生活圈子。 They know each other by sight, but their orbits do not touch.
vacant: adj. 1) an expression that shows that sb. does not seem to be thinking about anything She stared back at him, more vacant and stupid than he had ever seen her. 2) empty and available for sb. to use; a job or position in an organization that is vacant is available for sb. to start doing Bob went into the bar, but he couldn’t spot a single vacant seat. He applied for the job of Eliot’s personal secretary, which had just fallen vacant.
seminar: n. a class at a university or college for a small group of students and a teacher to study or discuss a particular subject Every week we have a seminar on modern political theory. A department-wide graduate seminar is held during each Michaelmas for the benefit of research students.
After Reading 1. Useful Expressions 2. Spot Dictation 3. Group Discussion 4. Make a Short Speech 5. Writing Practice 6. Talk about the Pictures 7. Proverbs and Quotations
Useful Expressions 1. 一个惊人的秘密 a stunning secret 2. 革命性的意义 revolutionary implication 3. 身患……疾病 be stricken with … 4. 学术职位 academic post 5. 有意义 make sense 6. 各种 full range of 7. 做出痛苦的抉择 make heartbreaking choice 8. 不谙世故 lack of worldliness
9. 全优生 a straight-A student 10. 轰动一时 an instant fad 11. 公共休息室 common room 12. 连珠炮似的说一通 talk a blue streak 13. 飞快的 with lightning speed 14. 双赢 mutual gain 15. 在多种不同情况下 under a wide variety of circumstances 16. 智囊团 think tank
17. 挑剔其他人的 作 knock other’s work 18. 遏制病情 arrest the disease 19. 电脑程序编制员 a computer programmer 20. 拮据的生活 a lean life 21. 经常保持联系 stay in regular contact 22. 奇迹般好转 a miraculous remission 23. 诺贝尔奖得主 a Nobel laureate 24. 无比忠诚 fierce loyalty
Spot Dictation Directions: In this section, you will hear a passage three times. When the passage is read for the first time, you should listen carefully for its general idea. When the passage is read for the second time, you are required to fill in the blanks. You can either use the exact words you have just heard or write down the main points in your own words. Finally, when the passage is read for the third time, you should check what you have written.
One could argue that if there was anything cliché about Ron the recycled theme Howard’s film A Beautiful Mind, it was (1) ________ of the “mad genius”. Russell Crow played John Nash, the (2) brilliant, social ______ mathematician who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994. It’s ______ hard to (3) critique the novel as cliché , however, because the ___________ concept of the “mad genius” wasn’t cultivated — Nash, indeed, __________. suffered from (4) a serious mental illness Nash wasn’t the only creative thinker to contribute to the “mad genius” phenomenon. Twentieth century American poet Sylvia Plath, who was believed to have suffered from severe bipolar disorder, (5) ________ committed suicide in 1963. Nineteenth century painter, Vincent Van Gogh, spent the later years of his life at the St. Remy Asylum after his act of damaging his ear. (6) The list goes on _________.
There have been (7) numerous studies in the past century ________ examining the “mad genius” phenomenon, the most impressive of these studies conducted in 1987 by Nancy C. Andersen. Conducting her studies at (8) the center for creative writing , the University of Iowa ____________ Workshops, Andersen examined 30 writers and found that 80% had experiences at least (9) ________________ one episode of major depression , hypomania, or mania. Andersen also found evidence suggesting that “mad genius” might be (10) a genetically heritable trait ___________.
Group Discussion The “Eccentric” Scientists I Know Step One: Form groups to talk about some anecdotes you have heard about scientists that can well illustrate their deviation from “normality”. Step Two: Sum up some common “eccentricities” of these scientists in groups. Step Three: Several groups report to class. Step Four: Sum up. Not only did John Nash possess some of the “eccentricities” you have mentioned, but he was also repeatedly hospitalized for mental disorder. Thanks to a loving and tolerant community, he was able to recover and reap honors and recognition.
Make a Short Speech Directions: Prepare individually for an imaginary speech given by John Nash at the Nobel prize awarding ceremony, in which he expressed gratitude to all those who had supported him.
Writing Practice 1. A brief introduction In our daily conversation, the questions with why are often asked answered. This shows that causal analysis is very common. Being logical is naturally the most important quality of any causal analysis. But it is not always easy to explain causes and effects clearly and logically. One reason for this is that an effect may have many causes and a cause may have many effects. So we must be thorough in our discussion and careful in our selection of details.
There are two basic ways of organizing paragraphs developed by cause and effect. The first method is to state an effect first and devote the rest of the paragraph to examining the causes. For example, the topic sentence is “In the past few years, higher education has become less important to young people than it was previously. ” This is an effect. It should be followed by a discussion of the causes of this effect, such as the pressure of fierce competition, better opportunities in the job market, a lot of the knowledge taught in universities and colleges being out-dated, and so forth. The second method is to state a cause first and then mention or predict the effects. Suppose the topic sentence is “More and more fertile land in China is taken up by new buildings. ” In the rest of the paragraph the effects should be mentioned, such as the reduction of the grain output, increasing environmental problems, too many peasants moving into the cities, etc.
2. Useful words or expressions because of owing to the reason for consequently hence result in have an effect on seeing that so as to thanks to since now that owe to so therefore as a result of the effect of the cause of for fear that so that out of as due to for this reason thus accordingly the result of the consequence of such that make possible
Homework Directions: You are required to write a composition on the topic “Why so many college students aspire to become a scientist? ” Your composition should be about 150 words.
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Proverbs and Quotations 1. Adversity is a good discipline. 苦难是磨炼人的好机会。 2. Health becomes sweet by the side of sickness. 和疾病相比较，才显得健康的可贵。 3. A friend is best found in adversity. 患难见真朋友。 4. Health and understanding are the two great blessings of life. 健康和互相体谅是人生两大幸事。
5. Imagination is more important than knowledge — Einstein, American scientist 想象力比知识更为重要。 —— 美国科学家 爱因斯坦 6. To spread knowledge is to spread happiness. The progress of scientific research and the ever-expanding fields will arouse hope while the bacteria existence in our body and mind will gradually disappear. — Nobel, Swedish chemist 传播知识就是播种幸福。科学研究的进展及其日益扩大的领域将唤起我们 的希望，而存在于人类身心的细菌也将逐渐消失。 —— 瑞典化学家 诺贝尔
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