Book - 10 continued ...

His professors in mathematics praised him but his fellow students thought him to be a very strange person. He could not be bullied as he was physically strong but he was seen as an immature person displaying childish tantrums; some even though that he had a mental problem; some even called him homo.  He appeared for Putnam Mathematical competition, a prestigious national competition for undergraduates twice but could not make it to the top five. This disappointed him. This may be the reason for Harvard offering him less scholarship than Princeton and he chose to go to Princeton after his graduation. He often bunked his lectures; he did not want to learn mathematics "second-hand" but rather tried to develop topics himself. It did help him; he could see problems in a totally novel way. During this period Nash established the mathematical principles of game theory, which in later years won him Nobel Prize for economics. 
In early 1950’s, Nash started teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); had an affair with Eleanor Stier and had a son out of wedlock from her in 1953. In 1957, he married Alicia Larde, a beautiful MIT physics student, who despite having later divorced him, continued to take care of him during his decades of infirmity. In between, from time to time, he also worked for the RAND Corporation which tried to apply game theory to military and diplomatic strategy. Nash’s work on game theory had made him a leading expert on the Cold War conflict. While working for RAND Corporation, he was arrested in a police operation to trap homosexuals and was dismissed from RAND corporation as a security risk.

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