29 Quotes by Sylvia Nasar

Among the students, the Phantom was often held up as a cautionary figure: Anybody who was too much of a grind or who lacked social graces was warned that he or she was “going to wind up like the Phantom.”10 Yet if a new student complained that having him around made him feel uncomfortable, he was immediately warned: “He was a better mathematician than you’ll ever be!

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