

Dangerous Knowledge - Four brilliant mathematicians whose genius tragically drove them insane - nreece
http://bestdocumentaries.blogspot.com/2007/09/dangerous-knowledge-full-documentary.html

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mechanical_fish
_four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel
and Alan Turing - whose genius... tragically drove them insane and eventually
led to them all committing suicide._

Correlation does not imply causality.

Not that I see any correlation here -- not by a long shot. I would embark on a
census of all the geniuses who did _not_ go insane, but this post is too short
to contain it. I will, however, not miss the opportunity to re-quote the first
line of Goodstein's _States of Matter_ , IMHO the most hilarious line in
physics-education history:

 _Ludwig Boltzmann, who spend much of his life studying statistical mechanics,
died in 1906 by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on his work, died
similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics._

Fortunately, most of us survived stat mech.

Finally, while one can obviously dispute the cause of Turing's death, and
claim that it might have had something to do with his "genius", it might also
have had _something_ to do with the public humiliation, the removal of his
security clearance (and thereby, effectively, his career in cryptography), and
the disfiguring hormonal treatments that were forced on him by a homophobic
society. I mean, you can see how that might have been kind of depressing.

~~~
yters
I wonder whether the stereotype of geniuses being manic depressives exists to
keep people from being geniuses? Of course, there are manic depressive
geniuses, but there are plenty of manic depressive non geniuses. Plus, the
stereotype can easily form a self fulfilling prophecy, due to social stigma.

~~~
mechanical_fish
The truth is rather sadder: There are lots of manic depressives among us, but
people prefer not to think about them, and their condition is so stigmatized
that they do not advertise it.

The only manic depressives that cannot be ignored are the famous ones.

------
ibsulon
Alternatively, three mentally I'll geniuses and a fourth who was tortured into
suicide after great service to his country. (to be fair, I only know about
Turing and Godel...)

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xirium
I'm (slowly) reading Kurt Goedel's incompleteness theorem. In 1931, he
developed his own notation and used it to concatenate strings of symbols,
merely as a building block in a larger proof. This was at least 10 years
before programmers would be able to instruct a running computer to concatenate
strings. He'd be a frustrated genius if he had the idea today because most
people still don't understand his insights.

------
gabrielleydon
re re re remix!

