A Beautiful Mind

Despite the apparent freedom of RAND, Nash finds its focus on military strategy limiting, desiring instead “to have the freedom to roam all over mathematics” (123). He decides to try to secure a faculty position at a university, taking a temporary position in Princeton working on a research project for the Navy in the meantime.

However, there is a more pressing threat to Nash’s freedom to live as he pleases and engage in more original research. In the summer of 1950, North Korea invades South Korea and the United States pledges its support. Before the summer is over, young men are being drafted into the army and Nash’s parents write to inform him that he may soon have to join them.

Nash is desperate to avoid the draft. In part, this is because an “interruption of his research could jeopardize his dream of joining a top-ranked mathematics department” (123-124). However, on a more fundamental level, Nash knows that not only his research but also the whole way he approaches life relies on him having the freedom to engage in original thinking and develop his own idiosyncratic thoughts and behaviors. As such, the idea of “life in the army, with its mindless regimentation, stultifying routines, and lack of privacy, revolt[s] him” (124).