
The violent attack that turned a man into a maths genius - uvesten
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190411-the-violent-attack-that-turned-a-man-into-a-maths-genius
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zelly
I don't see any proof that he's a math genius.

The attitude of the public seems to be that math is something you're supposed
to just "get" automatically by having a gift in your brain, as if it's not a
knowledge-based discipline that takes years of study. I think this comes from
mental math being confused for actual math---and mental math ability is
probably genetic.

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rofo1
Most people think that mathematicians work with numbers, when the truth is far
away from that.

You are most likely to end up having to work with something that cannot be
drawn or calculated and is superbly abstract, like some mappings from one
theoretical concept to another.

Sure, you can draw some "projections" from certain things to other things, or
"draw" an analogy to something simpler, but still most of the things are
highly abstract and are nowhere "simple" as numbers, or geometric figures or
something similar.

I think this is true at least in theoretical math research.

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wildylion
Am I the onyl one who thinks he's similar to Louis Wain? Both guys seemed to
be seeing fractals in their minds, after all.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Wain](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Wain)

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aaron695
:)

Do people believe this shit?

I get it makes for a great movie, which it is being made into, but a knock on
the head a math genius not makes. Nor does it improve maths.

Kudos to him for making money though.

His TEDx talk shows some of his craziness. I guess if you believe this story
you'll love the talk.

Again conspiracy theories are interesting, I watch Sci-Fi which is just a
conspiracy theory made for TV.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyYQIcZacvA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyYQIcZacvA)

He might have brought on synesthesia though, which is actually interesting and
perhaps real.

Vibration theory of olfaction which he mentions in the TED talk -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction)

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Starwatcher2001
Synesthesia is definitely real, my wife has it. She sees numbers and letters
as having colours. We'd been married a few years before either of us realised
there was something different about her, she just thought everyone saw the
world as she did. I didn't believe her at first, then asked her go through the
entire alphabet and tell me the colours she saw for each letter. To this day
they've never differed.

Words written in coloured ink are difficult for her to read, and trying to
read "rainbow" coloured text is virtually impossible as it makes her feel
sick.

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Zenbit_UX
Your comment about difficulty reading colored text gave me an idea for
diagnosing synesthesia early in children. To what end, I have no idea but it
sounds like it could work.

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tuesdayrain
There's a simple test for this. You can generate a page with tons of the same
letter or number, and a few outliers. A person with synesthesia will be able
to instantly spot the outliers while a neurotypical person won't. Something
like [https://www.synesthesiatest.org/blog/synesthesia-test-
variat...](https://www.synesthesiatest.org/blog/synesthesia-test-variations)

