The n-Category Café

Most likely that is already the case, could be that you act pretty weird every day and get away with it without realizing it.

Maybe we can use it to get away with some irresponsible behavior. Artists do that sort of thing all the time. Why can’t we?

Because we can’t all snuggle in the cozy bosom of the ivory tower, and those of us on the outside have to convince bottom-line driven hiring managers that a mathematician is not a dangerously unstable and risky investment.

Tim vB wrote:

Most likely that is already the case, could be that you act pretty weird every day and get away with it without realizing it.

That’s completely false. I do realize that I act pretty weird every day and get away with it! I’m even doing it right now.

That’s one of the great things about academia: certain kinds of behavior are acceptable there that aren’t in most other careers. It carves out a space where otherwise marginal people can live useful and happy lives. Without academia, I might have had to eke out a hand-to-mouth existence doing something like techno music.

John A. wrote:

… we can’t all snuggle in the cozy bosom of the ivory tower, and those of us on the outside have to convince bottom-line driven hiring managers that a mathematician is not a dangerously unstable and risky investment.

Yes, that’s unfortunate.

But anyway, I was just kidding: I’m not really calling for more documentaries promoting the image of mathematicians as dangerously risky nuts. So as long as those managers don’t read the $n$-Category Café, you’re probably okay.

I doubt that there is any connection, and this BBC “documentary” is probably one of the most interesting - well, whatever you call it - that’s ever been published about it.
There is of course a vast literature about gifted people who develop mental conditions because they cannot adapt to their environment for various reasons, by specialized therapists/psychologists.

Highly gifted people often act in a way that could look like they have some well known mental condition to the unwary observer.
Example: You are very gifted and therefore start a very ambitious project. You become very enthusiastic about it, telling people “no one has ever tried this before (with success)!” Of course they will not understand why anyone would get this excited about proving a theorem, painting a picture or writing a novel. Then you get stuck and despair.
Most people will get the impression that you suffer from a bipolar disorder (which is very annoying to both you and to anyone who really has a bipolar disorder, to say the least).

For a milder form correlated ? with creativity:

• Asperger’s Syndrome and High Achievement by Ioan James.

Well yes: Freud, Lacan… For some psychotics, art or science can indeed help handle their so-called symptom.

Which by no way means all psychotics are good artists or scientists; neither that good scientists of artists are necessarily psychotics.

Which also does not mean at all that being a psychotic is being inferior to some phantasized normal person. Lacan often paid tribute to the psychotic’s «rigor».

Someone in Iceland found a statistical link between mathematical ability and psychosis. The article appeared in the British Journal of Psychiatry in 2004. I corresponded with the author briefly at the time.

The article can be found here. It was only a rather crude statistical study. I’m not sure if it was followed up.

I certainly feel that mathematics makes me some variety of insane, and don’t know how any mathematicians manage to avoid that.

A new study on “Psychosis and Academic Performance” (communicated by May-Tzu).

Those questions were ‘rhetorical questions’. I didn’t really want answers… unless I’m very confused, in which case I would like to be corrected.

Did Cantor really commit suicide? I thought he died of a heart attack.

His MacTutor biography says he died of a heart attack, not suicide! More precisely:

In October 1899 Cantor applied for, and was granted, leave from teaching for the winter semester of 1899-1900. Then on 16 December 1899 Cantor’s youngest son died. From this time on until the end of his life he fought against the mental illness of depression. He did continue to teach but also had to take leave from his teaching for a number of winter semesters, those of 1902-03, 1904-05 and 1907-08. Cantor also spent some time in sanatoria, at the times of the worst attacks of his mental illness, from 1899 onwards. He did continue to work and publish on his Bacon-Shakespeare theory and certainly did not give up mathematics completely. He lectured on the paradoxes of set theory to a meeting of the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung in September 1903 and he attended the International Congress of Mathematicians at Heidelberg in August 1904.

In 1905 Cantor wrote a religious work after returning home from a spell in hospital. He also corresponded with Jourdain on the history of set theory and his religious tract. After taking leave for much of 1909 on the grounds of his ill health he carried out his university duties for 1910 and 1911. It was in that year that he was delighted to receive an invitation from the University of St Andrews in Scotland to attend the 500th anniversary of the founding of the University as a distinguished foreign scholar. The celebrations were 12-15 September 1911 but:

During the visit he apparently began to behave eccentrically, talking at great length on the Bacon-Shakespeare question; then he travelled down to London for a few days.

Cantor had hoped to meet with Russell who had just published the Principia Mathematica. However ill health and the news that his son had taken ill made Cantor return to Germany without seeing Russell. The following year Cantor was awarded the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws by the University of St Andrews but he was too ill to receive the degree in person.

Cantor retired in 1913 and spent his final years ill with little food because of the war conditions in Germany. A major event planned in Halle to mark Cantor’s 70th birthday in 1915 had to be cancelled because of the war, but a smaller event was held in his home. In June 1917 he entered a sanatorium for the last time and continually wrote to his wife asking to be allowed to go home. He died of a heart attack.

Next question:

Was Ludwig Boltzmann a mathematician? I thought he was a physicist.

According to his biography, “In 1869 Boltzmann was appointed to a chair of theoretical physics at Graz. He held this post for four years and then in 1873 he accepted the chair of mathematics at Vienna. He did not stay very long in any place and after three years he was back in Graz, this time in the chair of experimental physics.”

Most people today consider him a physicist.

He hanged himself while his wife and daughter were swimming, on a holiday with at the Bay of Duino near Trieste. What a terrible thing to do to your family! Poor guy!

And did Alan Turing commit suicide because his genius drove him insane? I thought it had something to do with the British government convicting him for homosexuality and punishing him by forcing him to take estrogen, which made him grow breasts.

Alan Turing died of cyanide poison. Quoting Wikipedia:

On 8 June 1954, Turing’s cleaner found him dead; he had died the previous day. A post-mortem examination established that the cause of death was cyanide poisoning. When his body was discovered an apple lay half-eaten beside his bed, and although the apple was not tested for cyanide, it is speculated that this was the means by which a fatal dose was delivered. An inquest determined that he had committed suicide, and he was cremated at Woking crematorium on 12 June 1954.

Turing’s mother argued strenuously that the ingestion was accidental, caused by her son’s careless storage of laboratory chemicals. Biographer Andrew Hodges suggests that Turing may have killed himself in an ambiguous way quite deliberately, to give his mother some plausible deniability. Others suggest that Turing was re-enacting a scene from the 1937 film Snow White, his favourite fairy tale, pointing out that he took “an especially keen pleasure in the scene where the Wicked Witch immerses her apple in the poisonous brew.”

Also: “An urban legend holds that the logo of Apple computers is a tribute to Alan Turing, with the bite mark a reference to his method of suicide, something that the company denies.”

I read somewhere that earlier in his life, Turing fantasized about the possibility of suicide by poisoned apple. Anyone know?

But, before reading the summary of this documentay, I’ve never heard anyone claim Turing’s genius drove him insane! That seems implausible.

I didn’t think he (John Baez) was asking the question seriously; it was more a rhetorical question whose answer is ‘no’.

Did Kurt Gödel commit suicide because of his genius? I think his death is considered partly attributable to mental illness, specifically paranoia, which led him to refuse to eat anything after his wife Adele died for fear that it was poisoned. That’s suicide in a sense, but I wouldn’t say it was attributable to his genius per se.

Did Alan Turing commit suicide because of his genius? I think John answered this one himself; the answer is almost surely ‘no’. He died by eating a cyanide-laced apple and suicide is presumed, although he left no suicide note. It is widely believed that it had something to do with the treatment imposed on him after being convicted of engaging in homosexual acts (he chose to undergo ‘therapy’ in lieu of a prison sentence, which involved hormonal treatments which caused him to grow breasts among other things, as John has already noted). I don’t think that means he committed suicide because of his genius.

Did Ludwig Boltzmann commit suicide because of his genius? My understanding is that he did in fact commit suicide: not only did he suffer from depressions, but he was a sufferer of excruciating headaches and was going blind, and when he became convinced that he was no longer able to work, took his own life. (I can track down my source of this if need be.) I don’t see that that means he committed suicide because of his genius.

Did Georg Cantor commit suicide because of his genius? I, like John, wasn’t aware that he committed suicide. He did suffer from depression, but again, how is that attributable to his being a genius, exactly? (Rhetorical question; it isn’t necessarily.)

The idea that a thin line separates genius from madness seems to me a well-worn trope, a kind of Romantic myth. There are many extremely gifted people who do not suffer from mental illness, and many who suffer from mental illness who do not possess extraordinary intellects. Somehow though this Promethean myth must strike a very deep chord in a lot of people.

When Pierre Bertaux was director of the french Sûreté, he ordered an investigation and concluded that Nietzsche had no syphilis or other illnesses, but poinsened himself by misusing his “Dr.”-titel for accessing very huge amounts of dangerous drugs. An other interesting, but questionable, idea of Bertaux was that Hölderlin only simulated a mental disorder.