Quotes from Sylvia Nasar

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

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

Para Dickens y Marx, la función de las empresas era controlar o explotar al trabajador. Para Mill, su función era enriquecer a los dueños. Para Marshall, la empresa no era una cárcel, y dirigir una empresa no significaba controlar a los presos. Competir por los clientes (o los trabajadores) exigía algo más que repetición ciega. Las empresas estudiadas por Marshall habían tenido que evolucionar para sobrevivir.

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.

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

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

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.

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 learned by painful processes of drill.

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.

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.

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.

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.

You are all my reasons.

Hey Nash! You scared?' 'Terrified,mortified,petrified...stupefied by you!

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

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

People look to the order of numbers when the world falls apart.

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

I thought I could save a very worthwhile person.

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

Delusion is not just fantasy but compulsion.

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

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

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!