John Forbes Nash

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.

Statement of 1996, as quoted in Dr. Riemann's Zeros (2003) by Karl Sabbagh, p. 88 , 2003

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.

As quoted in "A Brilliant Madness A Beautiful Madness (2002), PBS TV program; also cited in Doing Psychiatry Wrong: A Critical and Prescriptive Look at a Faltering Profession'' (2013) by René J. Muller, p. 62 , 2002

A less obvious type of application (of non-cooperative games) is to the study of . 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.

"Non-cooperative Games" in Annals of Mathematics, Vol. 54, No. 2 (September 1951); as cited in Can and should the Nash program be looked at as a part of mechanism theory? (2003) by Walter Trockel , 2003

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.

As quoted in A Beautiful Mind, (2001); also cited in Quantum Phaith (2011), by Jeffrey Strickland, p. 197 , 2001

The writer has developed a “dynamical” approach to the study of cooperative games based upon reduction to non-cooperative form. One proceeds by constructing a model of the preplay negotiation so that the steps of negotiation become moves in a larger non-cooperative game [which will have an infinity of pure strategies] describing the total situation. This larger game is then treated in terms of the theory of this paper [extended to infinite games] and if values are obtained they are taken as the values of the cooperative game. Thus the problem of analyzing a cooperative game becomes the problem of obtaining a suitable, and convincing, non-cooperative model for the negotiation. The writer has, by such a treatment, obtained values for all finite two-person cooperative games, and some special n-person games.

"Non-cooperative Games" in Annals of Mathematics, Vol. 54, No. 2 (September 1951) , 1951