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Quotes by John Nash

After my return to the dream-like delusional hypotheses in the later '60s, I became a person of delusionally influenced thinking but of relatively moderate behavior and thus tended to avoid hospitalization and the direct attention of psychiatrists.
– John Nash
Bluefield, a small city in a comparatively remote geographical location in the Appalachians, was not a community of scholars or of high technology.
– John Nash
But you see-you-you can't-so-you can't so well argue about these things. I've learned that it's better that I-I don't talk about it.
– John Nash
By the time I was a student in high school... I remember succeeding in proving the classic Fermat theorem about an integer multiplied by itself p times where p is a prime.
– John Nash
I also did electrical and chemistry experiments at that time. At first, when asked in school to prepare an essay about my career, I prepared one about a career as an electrical engineer like my father. Later, when I actually entered Carnegie Tech. in Pittsburgh, I entered as a student with the major of chemical engineering.
– John Nash
I did have strange ideas during certain periods of time.
– John Nash
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 Nash
I later spent... five to eight months in hospitals in New Jersey, always on an involuntary basis, and always attempting a legal argument for release.
– John Nash
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 Nash
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 Nash
I studied mathematics fairly broadly and I was fortunate enough... 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 Nash
I thought of the voices as... something a little different from aliens. I thought of them more like angels... It's really my subconscious talking, it was really that... I know that now.
– John Nash
I went to M.I.T. in the summer of 1951. I had been an instructor at Princeton for one year after obtaining my degree in 1950. It seemed desirable more for personal and social reasons than academic ones to accept the higher-paying instructorship at M.I.T.
– John Nash
I would finally renounce my delusional hypotheses and revert to thinking of myself as a human of more conventional circumstances and return to mathematical research.
– John Nash
It's almost as if a demon might have passed from one host to another.
– John Nash
My father, for whom I was named, was an electrical engineer and had come to Bluefield to work for the electrical utility company there which was and is the Appalachian Electric Power Company. He was a veteran of WW1 and had served in France as a lieutenant in the supply services.
– John Nash
My mother, originally Margaret Virginia Martin, but called Virginia, was herself also born in Bluefield. She had studied at West Virginia University and was a school teacher before her marriage, teaching English and sometimes Latin. But my mother's later life was considerably affected by a partial loss of hearing resulting from a scarlet fever infection that came at the time when she was a student at WVU.
– John Nash
My parents provided an encyclopedia, Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia, that I learned a lot from by reading it as a child.
– John Nash
Now I must arrive at the time of my change from scientific rationality of thinking into the delusional thinking characteristic of persons... But I will not really attempt to describe this long period of time but rather avoid embarrassment by simply omitting to give the details of truly personal type.
– John Nash
One aspect of this is that rationality of thought imposes a limit on a person's concept of his relation to the cosmos.
– John Nash
So as it happened, as soon as I heard in conversation at M.I.T. about the question of the embeddability being open, I began to study it. The first break led to a curious result about the embeddability being realizable in surprisingly low-dimensional ambient spaces provided that one would accept that the embedding would have only limited smoothness. And later... the problem was solved in terms of embeddings with a more proper degree of smoothness.
– John Nash
The mathematics faculty were encouraging me to shift into mathematics as my major and explaining to me that it was not almost impossible to make a good career in America as a mathematician. So I... became officially a student of mathematics. And in the end I had learned and progressed so much in mathematics that they gave me an M.S. in addition to my B.S. when I graduated.
– John Nash
The mental disturbances originated in the early months of 1959, at a time when Alicia happened to be pregnant. And as a consequence I resigned my position as a faculty member at M.I.T. and, ultimately... travelled to Europe and attempted to gain status there as a refugee.
– John Nash
While I was on the academic sabbatical of 1956-1957, I also entered into marriage. Alicia had graduated as a physics major from M.I.T. where we had met, and she had a job in the New York City area. She had been born in El Salvador but came at an early age to the U.S., and she and her parents had long been U.S. citizens, her father being an M.D. and ultimately employed at a hospital operated by the federal government in Maryland.
– John Nash