Quotes from Sylvia Nasar

Der Herr Gott ist raffiniert aber Boshaft ist Er nicht

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.

James Glass, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who has studied the delusions of schizophrenia, writes, "Delusion provides a certain, often unbreakable identity, and its absolute character can maneuver the self into an unyielding position. In this respect, it is the internal mirror of political authoritarianism, the tyrant inside the self … an internal domination as deadly as any external tyranny.

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.

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.

Nash was respected but not well liked.

several studies have since shown that basic military training during peacetime can precipitate schizophrenia in men with a hitherto unsuspected vulnerability to the illness.15

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

How many of the great mathematicians have been perverts?" None, was his answer. "Some lived celibate lives, usually on account of economic disabilities, but the majority were happily married. . . . The only mathematician discussed here whose life might offer something of interest to a Freudian is Pascal

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