Sylvia Nazar “The Path to a Great Goal: The Story of an Economic Idea”

Sylvia Nazar, based on whose book the film A Beautiful Mind was made, continues to search for an answer to the question: what is genius and what price does a person pay for his outstanding abilities

The real name of the American writer and economist, Columbia University professor Sylvia Nazar is Zulfiya. Her father is Uzbek and her mother is German. Zulfiya was born in Germany, and then the family moved to the USA, where the girl turned into Sylvia. One of the most important events of her life was a meeting with the great Russian-American economist Vasily Leontiev, under whose leadership she worked for several years. Perhaps this meeting determined the main theme of Sylvia Nazar – the study of the lives of those brilliant people who are able to change the world alone. Nazar became world famous with a book about mathematics, Nobel laureate in economics John Nash “A Beautiful Mind” (1998). Based on this book, the film A Beautiful Mind (dir. Ron Howard, 2001) was made. Another genius Nazar wrote about was Grigory Perelman*. Her new book is dedicated to Karl Marx, Joseph Schumpeter, John Keynes and other brilliant economists whose work has helped bring some order to the world economy. Nazar continues to search for an answer to the question: what is genius and what price does a person pay for his outstanding abilities.

* New Yorker, 2006, August 28.

Translation from English by Andrey Satunin, Natalia Shakhova.

AST, Corpus, 704 p.

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