“Classes will dull your mind, destroy the potential for authentic creativity.“
– John Nash (1928-2015), mathematician
WHILE completing my dissertation on interest rates, I had the distinct pleasure of taking a seminar with Columbia University mathematician, Andrew Gelman, a former student of John Nash.
If ‘A Beautiful Mind‘ rings a bell – whether the book or the film – you’ll recall that Nash famously struggled with schizophrenia.
The seminar zeroed in on one of his most important contributions: non-cooperative game theory, developed when Nash had largely regained control over his mental health.
That study would later anchor a book reviewed on March 2, 2025.
Coincidentally, the same book had inspired one of my columns exactly a year prior – on March 2, 2024.
At the time, few of us knew what to expect.
Most enrolled just for the chance to learn from Andrew himself.
The man was, simply put, a legend.
And though we’d seen him often lurking around the library with stacks of paper scribblings, none of us ever spoke to him.
Yet, we were curious about what a true scholar, someone who had studied under Nash himself, might have to say and how one might think.
Strangely enough, Andrew’s seminar didn’t make everyone on the faculty happy.
I remember one friend telling me attending it would be a “distinct waste of time”.
Others even chuckled at the thought of a person with a mental disability giving a coherent seminar on campus.
All this seemed ironic and cruel, given Andrew’s importance in the field and the fact that, with his work, most of their work would lack any importance at all.
Non-cooperative game theory is the study of how individuals or institutions might interact strategically if they don’t communicate, and Nash won the 1994 Nobel Prize for presenting the first, stable solution to such a situation.
A player can do no better in taking an action given the actions of other players, given the inability to cooperate.
If you loved the films, ‘The Usual Suspects’ or ‘LA Confidential’ for example, those plots demonstrated Nash Equilibrium in its great, Hollywood form.
In a nutshell, the principal characters are backed into situations where they make the best decisions they can, given what they expect others to do.
Everything becomes interesting when circumstance gives the good guys the upper hand.
Surprisingly, however, Andrew didn’t speak about non-coop game theory in our seminar.
Instead, he presented his latest work on cooperative game theory.
Coop-game theory is about how groups of individuals enforce behaviour to achieve certain outcomes.
Every spy movie with a dastardly syndicate influencing its members involves coop theory.
If non-cooperative game theory demonstrates powerlessness in the face of others’ actions, coop theory does the opposite.
It explains how power can be amassed, wielded and maintained with due punishment as an enforcement technique.
At the end of the day, what made Andrew’s presentation amazing was not so much the insights he presented – it was how he delivered them.
He had a way of looking at things differently, and that perspective stuck with me.
It didn’t just shape how I built my models; in a lot of ways, it changed how I see the world.
Andrew painted the picture of an idea in an audience member’s mind, then slowly brought that picture to life in the audience member’s head.
In watching and listening to him, it was truly a glimpse of how genius can be communicated.
After the presentation, our group went to his room for cookies and discussion.
Of course, while Andrew wanted to talk about his research results and possible extensions, we were eager to know about his life and how he became a Nashian.
I asked him, for example, who had influenced his choice of dissertation topic and he said, no one.
Another person wondered whether Andrew’s work was widely accepted at the time, and he still said, no.
Finally, we hit the jackpot when we asked Andrew how his current research model could make sense of today’s political landscape.
All of a sudden, this 45-something-year-old man who’d seemingly awakened from years of dormancy stood up and spoke to us with a 20-year-old’s energy.
He started illustrating the interesting point that powerful, cooperative relationships stem from the lack of power, not from the possession of it.
Enforcing the rules of a coalition was really about playing on the fears and insecurities of other members, not those of the less powerful, as one might think.
All of that made a sort of counterintuitive sense to us.
It made me think, for example, about Hitler’s rise to power and his ability to create alliances with the leadership of ‘seemingly nice countries’.
In school, we were taught that most of these countries fell under Hitler’s sway for fear of Nazi invasion.
Andrew’s model, however, suggested insecurity was what might have motivated the Axis powers to cooperate.
But while we pondered his ideas, what further amazed us was his humility and hunger for intellectual interaction.
He spoke to us as colleagues, not as pupils.
He invited us to challenge, not merely to validate his thinking or defer to his age.
He also encouraged us when we were on the right track, and gently corrected us when we weren’t – always making it clear that getting it wrong was never a failure.
While the dumbest person in the room, I felt especially fortunate to interact with him this way.
At one point, he complimented some math solutions I’d written on the whiteboard.
I remember thinking, “A Nash disciple just said he likes the way I think – I need to call my mother!”
A couple of weeks later, I was summoned to the Dean’s office.
Given my growing collection of rejections from firms back home, I assumed it was just another polite no.
But it wasn’t.
There, in a tailored suit and polished shoes, stood a bold man with a Goldman Sachs lapel pin.
He didn’t waste time.
“I’ll be direct,” he said.
“We heard you’ve been fielding interest from JP Morgan.”
I nodded, unsure where this was going.
“I’m here to convince you not to sign anything yet. We’ve reviewed your work. It’s raw, yes. Unorthodox. But that’s precisely why we’re interested.”
He pulled a printout from his folder and slid it across the table – a derivatives pricing problem, something nested in volatility skews and yield curve arbitrage.
“Our team’s been stuck on this for months,” he said.
“I want to see how you approach it.”
I worked through the problem on the spot, explaining each assumption and step as clearly as I could – even if my English tripped over itself a few times.
I used shorthand formulas and model tweaks I’d been developing with Andrew’s methods in mind.
When I finished, I looked up.
He wasn’t taking notes.
Just staring – at the calculations, then at me, then at the Dean.
A short laugh escaped him, almost in disbelief.
“That’s a non-standard path to convergence,” he said. “And you did it without a pricing model?”
“Just Andrew’s method. Modified.”
“You share this with JP?”
“No.”
“Keep it that way.”
He leaned back, still processing.
“This is the first time I’ve seen this logic applied in real-time. Our London desk missed this angle entirely.”
“You think this trades?”
“Yes,” I said.
“But on my timeline. I control everything. Not market convention, not the regulator’s. My version assumes tighter cycle discipline and a more aggressive risk window.”
“Show me.”
So I opened my laptop and walked him through the model using a live feed from Bursa Malaysia tracking a sovereign wealth fund’s asset rotation cycle, exploiting mismatches in timing and risk tolerance – he watched it all.
“These figures verified?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Stress-tested across multiple liquidity scenarios.”
I reached into my bag and laid out handwritten scribbles – positioning notes, volatility corridors, and laddered spread assumptions.
He turned to the Dean, almost stunned.
“He could start with us tomorrow.”
“Now I see why compliance lit up. He’s not just bending their rules – he’s targeting institutional flows before the Street sees them. We’ve been chasing an Alpha like him for years – but no one’s been able to spot it. Until now.”
Well, that was the beginning of the end of my time with Andrew.
And though I doubt he took much away from us, we definitely took a great deal away from him.
He taught me, for example, that brilliant ideas are not the exclusive domain of people with great minds; yet, it’s hard to imagine many people deserving the title “great” without producing brilliant ideas.
Andrew also proved that we mathematicians are no less artistic and creative in our ideas than the greatest artists, unless we choose to be so.
When he signed off my dissertation, he recognised my quiet defiance of rigid hierarchies in mathematical thought.
To him, it probably seemed like a natural extension of my life experiences.
He’d already been curious, judging by the questions he asked regarding my upbringing.
He taught me that even scholars need other people to correct their thinking and vet their ideas (as he had done interacting with Nash and John Von Neumann).
Most importantly, Andrew showed me that anyone’s mind can be beautiful if it focuses on producing beautiful ideas, no matter who you are or where you’re from.
As a small gesture of thanks, I recently took Andrew, the Dean, and the ever-bold David Solomon back to my village in Padawan.
For once, this time, the lesson was mine to give.
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of Sarawak Tribune. The writer can be reached at med.akilis@gmail.com
