29 Quotes by Sylvia Nasar

[...] a decade as notable for its supreme faith in human rationality as for its dark anxieties about mankind’s survival [...]

Woodrow Wilson, like most other educated Americans of his time, despised mathematics, complaining that "the natural man inevitably rebels against mathematics, a mild form of torture that could only be leaned by painful process of drill.

Nash’s genius was of that mysterious variety more often associated with music and art than with the oldest of all sciences. It wasn’t merely that his mind worked faster, that his memory was more retentive, or that his power of concentration was greater. The flashes of intuition were non-rational. Like other great mathematical intuitionists — Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann, Jules Henri Poincaré, Srinivasa Ramanujan — Nash saw the vision first, constructing the laborious proofs long afterward.

Steenrod was a careful, methodical man who chose his suits and sports coats according to a mathematical formula and had a mania for thinking up highly logical, if impractical, solutions to social problems like crime.

In 1950, he was accorded the dubious honor of being the first prominent scientist to appear on the earliest of Senator Joseph McCarthy’s famous lists of crypto-communists.

There is no sign of a mathematical pedigree in Nash’s ancestry or any indication that mathematics was much in the air at the Nash household.

His heroes were solitary thinkers and supermen like Newton and Nietzsche.

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

Nash was respected but not well liked.