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

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!

42 A few months after Nash got out, Baumecker called the Institute for Advanced Study and asked to speak to Oppenheimer about whether Nash was now sane. Oppenheimer replied, “That’s something no one on earth can tell you, doctor.

Hopes of putting their sad history behind them was bound to be bittersweet.

Fermat’s assertion that if n is any whole number and p any prime, then n multiplied by itself p times minus n is divisible by p.

In The Dynamics of Creation, Anthony Storr, the British psychiatrist, contends that an individual who “fears love almost as much as he fears hatred” may turn to creative activity not only out of an impulse to experience aesthetic pleasure, or the delight of exercising an active mind, but also to defend himself against anxiety stimulated by conflicting demands for detachment and human contact.21.

It was like a tornado, you want to hold on to everything you have, you don’t want to let anything go.

A profound dislike for merely absorbing knowledge and a compulsion to learn by doing are among the most reliable signs of genius.

I’ve made the most important discovery of my life. It’s only in the mysterious equation of love that any logic or reasons can be found.

A profile, a look, a voice, can capture a heart in no time at all.