29 Quotes by Sylvia Nasar

A genius with a penis. Isn’t that what we all want?” an actress once quipped, and the quip captures the combination of brains, status, and sex appeal that made Nash so irresistible.

The Nashes pushed Johnny as hard socially as they did academically. At first, it was Boy Scout camp and Sunday Bible classes; later on, lessons at the Floyd Ward dancing school and membership in the John Aldens Society, a youth organization devoted to improving the manners of its members.

Many great scientists and philosophers, among them René Descartes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Immanuel Kant, Thorstein Veblen, Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein, have had similarly strange and solitary personalities.

RAND scientists tried to tell their wives that the decision whether to buy or not to buy a washing machine was an “optimization problem.

The main interest of Fermat, who shares the credit for inventing calculus with Newton and analytic geometry with Descartes, was number theory —“the higher arithmetic.

Other mathematical geniuses, Einstein and Bertrand Russell among them, recount similarly revelatory experiences in early adolescence.

Delusion is not just fantasy but compulsion.

It was the great Hungarian-born polymath John von Neumann who first recognized that social behavior could be analyzed as games.

In 1958, Fortune singled Nash out for his achievements in game theory, algebraic geometry, and nonlinear theory,