<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=192888919167017&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1">
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
March 19, 2024

Linkedin Pinterest

In Our View: It’s Good To Be A Nerd

Death of Nobel Prize winner John Nash reminds how society\u2019s views have changed

The Columbian
Published:

It is cool these days to be a nerd. To be bookish and smart. To see things a little differently from the norm.

Sure, a certain level of nerdiness — when accompanied by genius — always has had some benefits. As the popular sporting chant goes for fans of academically rich but athletically challenged colleges goes, “That’s all right, that’s OK, you’re going to work for us someday.” Yet it is a relatively new phenomenon of the digital age that nerds are celebrated in popular culture.

The impetus for this important-but-hardly-original observation was the death last week of Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash, who was portrayed in the Oscar-winning 2001 film, “A Beautiful Mind.” Nash, 86, died along with his wife, Alicia, when the taxi they were riding in was involved in a crash.

Nash’s life provides a compelling narrative — even aside from the genius part. Beginning when he was 30, he developed debilitating mental illness, specifically, paranoid schizophrenia. Imagining people who weren’t there and envisioning conspirators out to get him, Nash eventually saw his career and his home life derailed. After a decade or so, the illness began to slowly subside, which Nash attributed to the aging process and natural biological changes.

He eventually returned to work, repaired relationships — he divorced and later remarried his wife — and in 1994 was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for the work he did as a young man in developing game theory. “It was the first tool for thinking systematically about what happens in markets when participants engage in strategic behavior — that is, take into account what other players are doing,” explained Sylvia Nasar, who wrote the acclaimed biography that was the basis for the movie. Nasar said Nash’s theories now guide the actions of the Federal Reserve, have altered how government goods are sold and play a role in how we approach environmental issues.

All of that might sound ethereal to most of us, but the Hollywood depiction presented Nash’s genius — even mad genius — in an absorbing and sympathetic fashion. Yet the interesting part is that Nash is not the only nerd to receive empathetic treatment in a major motion picture in recent years. Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was the subject of the 2014 film, “The Theory of Everything,” which earned a best-actor Oscar for Eddie Redmayne. And Alan Turing, a British mathematician who led a team of code-breakers that played a key role in defeating the Nazis in World War II, was the subject of the highly regarded 2014 movie, “The Imitation Game.”

Now, being a nerd hasn’t always been regarded as a positive. As Webster’s defines it, a nerd is “a person who behaves awkwardly around other people and usually has unstylish clothes, hair, etc.,” which likely is not meant as a compliment. But in the computer age, in an era when people such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have altered the everyday life of a vast majority of humans, creative thinkers are being celebrated more than ever. As poet Ezra Pound once observed, “Genius . . . is the capacity to see 10 things where the ordinary man sees one.”

This always has been true, but it seems as though society — at least American society — views nerds just a little differently than it used to. As author John Green wrote: “Why is being a nerd bad? Saying I notice you’re a nerd is like saying, ‘Hey, I notice that you’d rather be intelligent than be stupid, that you’d rather be thoughtful than be vapid . . .’ ” And, in some rare cases, that you just might change the world.

Loading...