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.