"On the contrary, I very often feel stupid. I often have the experience of not being able to understand what everyone else seems to. Somebody will say something and I'll think, Now what the hell does that mean? That doesn't make any sense. And then someone else will answer and his response is incomprehensible as the first one's statement....Lonely? It's damned lucky. A lucky thing for me that it's been decided the things I can see are the important ones, so I turn out smart instead of stupid. Oh, I think maybe when I was young I was lonely for a while. There weren;t too many other kids interested in playing around with numbers all the time. But I discovered early on that I liked ideas much better than people, and that was the end of my loneliness."

"A graduate student in philosophy marries a world-renowned mathematician. He turns out to be a self-centered (absent-minded?) jerk. Using this as an excuse, she starts whining and fooling around. It supposedly gives us a glimpse of the personalities of mathematicians (among other things): how they think, how they behave, what happens at department parties, and so on. I found it very stereotypical. The mathematics itself is not relevant, except at some point we are given the title of the guy's seminal work: something to do with hypernumbers, or supernumbers. You can tell I didn't like the book, but there it is."

"Philosophy grad student Renee is looking for the meaning of life and thinks she might find it with unworldly mathematical genius Noam Himmel. A cruel but quite funny satire on life around an elite math department. Set in Princeton around 1980, many of the characters are supposedly recognisable depictions of real people. For another (non-fiction) view of the same community, check out `A Beautiful Mind', Sylvia Nasar's excellent biography of John Nash."

"It's a common belief among philosophers that Noam is a thinly disguised Saul Kripke, the renowned Princeton philosopher of language (but who studied mathematics)."

Quite interesting on the strict Jewish background, and also in virtue of bein a thinly disguised story about Kripke