At GAMES 08, John Nash gave one of the semi-plenary lectures, the conference being so sprawling that it would have been impossible to fit all the attendees in a single room. The lecture hall, which was truly massive and must have been among the largest on Northwestern’s campus, was packed to the brim. Everyone wanted to hear the Nobel prize winner’s talk, obtusely titled Work on a Project to Study Three-Person Cooperative Games Using the ‘Agencies Method’ in a Variation Employing Attorney-Agents of an Automatic (or Robotic) Type.

It would be difficult to call it the worst lecture I’ve ever attended, but only because my sample size was five minutes. Nash had brought his lecture notes typewritten on transparencies, which in retrospect was a warning sign. He read about two sentences with difficulty before jumping off into a disjointed, rambling, rather frightening monologue in which seeds, frogs, and the nucleolus seemed to play the principal roles. Lacking any sense of what the talk was actually on, and with Nash’s speaking pace a rapidly decelerating drawl, I made a quick exit — though I’ll note I wasn’t the first, and certainly not the last, person to bail out of that lecture hall.

Throughout GAMES, Nash was treated as a brilliant elder statesman, in the Manuel Blum or Michael Rabin mold, instead of what he is: a sad and senile old man. Obviously, the guy has lived a difficult, bizarre, and haunted life. But he needs to be accepted on his own terms, not treated like a zoo animal to gawk at and have your picture taken with. Leave him be.

At the very least, stop inviting him to give distinguished lectures (looking at you, Brazilian Workshop of the Game Theory Society). To borrow from von Neumann, it’s just a fixed point theorem.