Newman is a Harvard graduate student who befriends some mathematicians at MIT in early 1950s, including John Nash. He is considered a “genius and is “a big, brash, blond swaggerer” who becomes “friendly friends” with Nash and helps to draw him into a tight social circle of mathematicians. Nash makes sexual advances on Newman, who laughs them off; Newman is one of Nash’s first friends to realize that Nash might be attracted to men.