John Nash, subject of the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, will talk for the first time in public about his struggle with schizophrenia and his unexpected Nobel Prize at Europe's first Mathematics Festival in Rome in three weeks.
Other star speakers will be Benoit Mandelbrot, father of fractal geometry, and Sir Andrew Wiles, solver of the most fiendish maths riddle of the last 400 years, Fermat's Last Theorem.
Former world chess champion Boris Spassky will talk to Nobel prize winner for Physics Zhores Alferov about the relationship between maths and chess, while Nobel prizewinning playwright Dario Fo will entertain what is expected to be mainly a young crowd with a show illustrating the fun side of perspective.
Nicola Piovani, Oscar-winning composer of the music to Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful, will present a piece of musical research on the number seven.
"We have to get away from the stuffy side of the subject," said former cabinet minister and professional mathematician Luigi Berlinguer, one of the organisers.
He said the festival would include a host of games to keep visitors' minds amused as well as engaged.
Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni said the fest at the city's showcase Auditorium would "proudly" join an array of high-profile annual events on philosophy, science, literature, photography and cinema.
"Mathematics is the foundation of modern life, of course, but without it there would be no music or philosophy," Veltroni noted, announcing the all-star cast.
Nash, who won his Nobel in 1994 for his theory of "non-competitive equlibria" - memorably illustrated in the Russell Crowe film by a win-win bar pick-up situation if the contenders forget about the blonde they wanted in the first place - will talk to the festival director, eminent Italian mathematician Piergiorgio Odifreddi, on the final day of the fest.
Entry is free but on a first-come, first-served basis, Veltroni said.
The festival, entitled The Beauty of Numbers and the Numbers of Beauty, runs from March 15 to 18.
