John Forbes Nash, Jr. Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better. In madness, I thought I was the most important person in the world.

John Forbes Nash, Jr.
I had been offered fellowships to enter as a graduate student at either Harvard or Princeton. But the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous, since I had not actually won the Putnam competition... Thus Princeton became the choice for my graduate study location.

John Forbes Nash, Jr.
You don't have to be a mathematician to have a feel for numbers. A movie, by the way, was made — sort of a small-scale offbeat movie — called Pi recently. I think it starts off with a big string of digits running across the screen, and then there are people who get concerned with various things, and in the end this Bible code idea comes up. And that ties in with numbers, so the relation to numbers is not necessarily scientific, and even when I was mentally disturbed, I had a lot of interest in numbers.

John Forbes Nash, Jr.
Though I had success in my research both when I was mad and when I was not, eventually I felt that my work would be better respected if I thought and acted like a 'normal' person.

John Forbes Nash, Jr.
A less obvious type of application (of non-cooperative games) is to the study of cooperative games. By a cooperative game we mean a situation involving a set of players, pure strategies, and payoffs as usual; but with the assumption that the players can and will collaborate as they do in the von Neumann and Morgenstern theory. This means the players may communicate and form coalitions which will be enforced by an umpire. It is unnecessarily restrictive, however, to assume any transferability or even comparability of the pay-offs [which should be in utility units] to different players. Any desired transferability can be put into the game itself instead of assuming it possible in the extra-game collaboration.

John Forbes Nash, Jr.
As a graduate student I studied mathematics fairly broadly and I was fortunate enough, besides developing the idea which led to "Non-Cooperative Games," also to make a nice discovery relating to manifolds and real algebraic varieties. So I was prepared actually for the possibility that the game theory work would not be regarded as acceptable as a thesis in the mathematics department and then that I could realize the objective of a Ph. D. thesis with the other results.

John Forbes Nash, Jr.
I never saw my grandfather because he had died before I was born, but I have good memories of my grandmother and of how she could play the piano at the old house.

John Forbes Nash, Jr.
By the time I was a student in high school I was reading the classic Men of Mathematics by E. T. Bell and I remember succeeding in proving the classic Fermat theorem about an integer multiplied by itself p times where p is a prime.

John Forbes Nash, Jr.
I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium and symptoms of schizophrenia.

John Forbes Nash, Jr.
Statistically, it would seem improbable that any mathematician or scientist, at the age of 66, would be able through continued research efforts, to add much to his or her previous achievements. However I am still making the effort and it is conceivable that with the gap period of about 25 years of partially deluded thinking providing a sort of vacation my situation may be atypical. Thus I have hopes of being able to achieve something of value through my current studies or with any new ideas that come in the future.

John Forbes Nash, Jr.
I seem to be thinking rationally again in the style that is characteristic of scientists. However, this is not entirely a matter of joy as if someone returned from physical disability to good physical health.

John Forbes Nash, Jr.
Gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.

John Forbes Nash, Jr.
Rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos.

John Forbes Nash, Jr.