Inbreeding
Early in the book, Nash is described by those who knew him when he was a student as being opposed to racial mixing, anti-Semitic, and having a very strong interest in genealogy. He believed in the supremacy of aristocratic bloodlines to which he claimed to belong. The fact that both he and his son developed schizophrenia makes boasting of superior genetic purity corrosively and tragically ironic.
An Ironic Mind
Irony can be beautiful in the sublime way it goes about subverting the tendency of humans to see themselves as superior. Nature played a cruel game of irony on John Nash. The brain that was capable of feats of absolute brilliance limited only to a few people in a century is also the very same brain that produced the symptoms of schizophrenia.
A Visionary Mind
Throughout the book, Nash’s genius is illustrated as a capacity to see things that others didn’t and then set about proving it. Ironically, his schizophrenia is characterized by seeing things that others don’t and not being able to prove it because it is a delusion.
The Social Loner
Nash is projected as the ultimate loner genius, preferring to live in solitude and possessed of myriad anti-social personality traits even before the schizophrenia hits. This makes what he was working in isolation all the more ironic since the Nash equilibrium is essentially put to use to as a means of figuring out to do what benefits society rather than individual self-interest.
“Game” Theory
As if often the case with scientific theories, irony runs throughout the development of game theory. What sounds like theorem which would immediately apply to sports and leisure, the very first thing the government could come up with as a way to test game theory was, of course, “winning” a nuclear war.
