Sylvia Nasar

Sylvia Nasar (born August 17, 1947) is a German-born American economist, biographer, and academic renowned for her bestselling book A Beautiful Mind (1998), a biography of mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr. that won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography and served as the basis for the Academy Award-winning film of the same name in 2001.

Born in Rosenheim, Bavaria, to a German mother and an Uzbek father, Nasar immigrated with her family to the United States in 1951, settling initially in New York and Washington, D.C., before moving to Ankara, Turkey, where her father worked as an economist for the World Bank. She grew up speaking multiple languages and experienced diverse cultural influences that shaped her interdisciplinary approach to economics and storytelling. Nasar earned a B.A. in literature from Antioch College in 1970 and an M.A. in economics from New York University in 1976, later receiving honorary doctorates from DePaul University in 2005 and Niagara University in 2011.