The greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century on the border between genius and madness

“I do not dare to say that there is a direct relationship between mathematics and madness, but I have no doubt that genius mathematicians suffer from their manic characters, delusions and symptoms of schizophrenia” – John Forbes Nash.

The relationship between mathematics and madness goes back to very distant times. They were discussed on the example of himself Pythagoras, who introduced the cult of sacred numbers. He announced that he had been sent from heaven and appointed himself the spiritual leader of the religious-philosophical community, the Pythagoreans.

Sources say that this outstanding mathematician gave his contemporaries many reasons to suspect a mental illness, publicly claiming that in his previous life he was the son of Hermes, he fought in the Trojan War, he was engaged in fishing, and even … that he was a beautiful courtesan who accompanied the influential nights men.

He also promised his resurrection. In Croton, where he lived, it was widely believed that his followers had fallen into madness, and Pythagoras himself was driven from the city, turning his house to ashes.

Geniuses with schizophrenia

Several brilliant mathematicians suffering from schizophrenia who happened to live in the past century have been written in the pages of history. Vashishtha Narayan Singh, Kurt Goedel, John Nash and Alexander Grothendieck achieved significant successes before they became ill.

However, it should be clearly emphasized that we do not currently have evidence of a relationship between above-average mathematical abilities and susceptibility to mental disorders.

– Schizophrenia belongs to the group of psychoses, i.e. diseases that change a person’s sense of reality – explains Dr. Dariusz Wasilewski, a specialist psychiatrist, medical director of the Allenort Therapy Clinics.

– Man recognizes the surrounding world differently, interprets it differently. The symptoms of schizophrenia include disturbed thinking processes. These may be about the course of the thoughts themselves becoming inconsistent or about the content (known as delusions). Delusions are false judgments about the world that are not corrected by the person despite the evidence that they are wrong. He is completely uncritical, so no one can convince him that he is wrong, he continues.

– Delusions can be persecutory in nature, the patient then thinks that someone is following him or eavesdropping. They can be sexual when the sick person relates everything that is happening to himself. They may appear too delusions of grandeur, giving a sense of extraordinary power, or delusions of possession, making the patient feel that he is ruled by a mysterious divine, satanic or cosmic power. We often observe hallucinations, hallucinations, a person hears that someone is talking about him behind the wall, drilling to establish a wiretap or inject poisonous gas.

– Hallucinations inside the head are characteristic of schizophrenia – adds Dr. Wasilewski. – The patient then hears his own thoughts or voices in his head, which talk about him, order him to do something or, on the contrary, forbid something. All this translates into the actions of the patient and his contacts with other people. People suffering from schizophrenia most often withdraw from professional, friends and family contacts, says Dr. Wasilewski.

– Agreement becomes more and more difficult and behavior less and less predictable. They withdraw into the world of their own experiences; this symptom is called autism. This psychosis does not interfere with intelligencebut it prevents a person from using it in a way that is characteristic of a healthy person. He does not use it because he ceases to be interested in it. This is not his world anymore. In this sense, we also lose this man, because we can no longer use his abilities.

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John Forbes Nash – the protagonist of “Beautiful Mind”

The figure of this eminent scholar, Nobel laureate and inmate of psychiatric hospitals, became widely known for his biography by Sylvia Nasar, entitled “A Beautiful Mind” and the film with Russell Crowe of the same title.

At 29, Nash was a professor at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was widely regarded as one of the greatest modern mathematicians. The world lay at his feet, only to break into tiny pieces in a moment. The reason – paranoid schizophrenia.

It started disappearing for days without warning. Upon his return, Nash did not explain the reasons for his absence. He gave nonsensical orders during his lectures, and did not allow visitors to his office to stand between him and the door.

Delusions later followed. The mathematician believed he was being followed. He heard secret messages coded on the radio, meant exclusively for him. In this way, God showed him that He had chosen him and called for a world government. At the same time, the mathematician was convinced that the Soviet Union and the Vatican were plotting against his mission.

He said, “I started to hear some kind of telephone calls in my brain from people who were against my ideas.”

Needless to say, he lost his job. Paranoid schizophrenia cut him off from practicing mathematics for 25 years. He kept coming back to her during brief periods of remission. However, when the disease attacked, he traveled, among others around Europe, trying to convince the local governments to grant him refugee status.

He even managed to travel behind the Iron Curtain to the GDR, which worried the US government as Nash previously worked for RAND (a research organization formed for the US military). In addition, he spent time obsessively analyzing passages from the Bible that he applied to his own life.

Surprisingly, at the end of the 80s, the disease began to recede, and in 1990, doctors considered him cured.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. Why? His game theory found practical application in research on the organization of industry and financial markets. Apparently, the idea came to him in a bar, where, like some other guys, he was trying to attract the attention of a beautiful girl.

John Forbes Nash and his wife died in a car accident in 2015. The couple were returning by taxi from the airport after arriving in Norway, where Nash received the Abel Prize – the Nobel Prize for mathematicians (Alfred Nobel excluded them from his will).

A week after the accident, another mathematician, Cedric Villani, stated in the pages ofThe Times »that Nash was working on a groundbreaking discoveryabout which he had informed him three days before his death. Villani revealed that it was a new version of the famous Einstein equation that better explains quantum gravity.

An Indian who wanted to challenge the theory of relativity

The life of the Indian genius Vashishth Narayan Singh, who is also credited with questioning the E = mc2 equation, was tragically, likening him to another Indian mathematics genius Ramanujan, a self-taught man who died in 1920, who claimed that the goddess Namagiri sent him formulas and dream results .

Vashishtha Narayan Singh was born in 1942 in a small village in India. A talent for lightning-fast calculations was noticed very early on in him. At the Indian college where he was studying, he was allowed to defend his bachelor’s thesis one year after starting his studies, and his master’s thesis after two. It was then that he met John L. Kelly, then head of the mathematics department at the University of Berkeley. Apparently Kelly gave him a difficult task to solve, and when the young man dealt with it, he invited him to Berkeley.

The brilliant Indian began studying mathematics in California, and in 1969 he obtained his doctorate at Berkeley and became Professor Kelly’s assistant.

He also collaborated with NASA. It is said that during the preparation of the Apollo mission, when NASA’s computers stopped working, he was called to do some calculations. Apparently, when the defect was fixed, it turned out that the results he obtained did not differ from the computers’ calculations.

In 1974, the symptoms of mental illness became more and more pronounced. Singh claimed to be seeing the long deceased Kelly. He also made a sudden decision to leave the USA. He returned to India where he became a lecturer in Kanpur, Mumbai and Calcutta. However, the schizophrenia has intensified.

Vashishtha Singh started treatment, but it didn’t work. He was still involved in mathematics, but communicated in a language that only he understood. The bystanders heard the incoherent gibberish. Finally, in 1988, Singh disappeared. He secretly left the hospital without revealing where he was going.

Years later, he was found in his homeland. He lived in terrible conditions, wore ragged clothes, and could barely make ends meet. The fight against the disease, which lasted more than three decades, ended in a disaster. Vashishtha Narayan Singh died at the age of 72.

Kurt Goedel – the one who proved the ability to travel in time

A terrible end was caused by illness for Kurt Goedl. The mathematical genius starved to death in an American hospital. He believed that someone wanted to poison him, so he ate only what his wife cooked or what she had tasted before. Unfortunately, the woman was hospitalized for six months …

Kurt Goedel is the greatest logician of all time, creator of the mathematics incompleteness theorem. He also dealt with the general theory of relativity, to which he derived solutions that allowed time travel. He was Austrian, but he felt he was Jewish. Worse still, the Austrian Nazis, who brutally attacked him many times, also believed in his Jewish roots.

Goedel was also one of the few scholars who argued with Einstein as equals. However, while Einstein was outgoing and witty, Goedel avoided people. He ate nothing but butter and baby pudding, sometimes adding a handful of laxatives to his menu. He believed in ghosts. When there were some prominent mathematicians in the city, he would lock himself at home for fear that they would try to kill him.

He was twenty-four years old when he proved his incompleteness theorems, slightly less than Einstein when he created the theory of relativity. Additionally, he was convinced that logic is not the only way to get to know this reality. He claimed that we also have a kind of extrasensory perception, which he called “mathematical intuition”.

After the Anschluss of Austria, Goedel decided to go to Princeton, where he was offered a position at the Institute for Advanced Study. He had attended lectures before, but the trip ended with a nervous breakdown and the logician returned to his homeland for treatment. After the outbreak of the war, he decided that the journey across the Atlantic was too risky. So he and his wife traveled across the USSR on the Trans-Siberian Railway and across the Pacific, with a stop in Japan, to the United States. Although he was still little known to the world, he quickly achieved divine status at Princeton. Apparently, other professors boasted that “they had just seen Goedl in a supermarket at a frozen food stand”.

After Einstein’s death, he completely withdrew from academic life. All his calls were made on the phone only, even if his interlocutor was a few meters away. He made appointments and then went somewhere remote. He was hallucinating, sniffing around for conspiracies on his life. According to his death certificate, the cause of death was “malnutrition and loss of consciousness” due to “personality disorders”.

Alexander Grothendieck – from an eminent mathematician to a possessed ecologist

Alexander Grothendieck, considered one of the greatest mathematicians of the XNUMXth century, dealt with the theory of Banach spaces and linear-topological spaces. The creator of the modern foundations of algebraic geometry, who was cut off from the world by the disease in his forties.

Marvin Jay Greenberg, retired professor of mathematics at the University of Santa Cruz, recalled his first meeting with him: “I saw him at a lecture and immediately thought that he was a representative of some advanced alien civilization who had been transferred to us to accelerate our intellectual evolution.” .

Grothendieck’s way of thinking embodied pure mathematical reasoning: “a combination of intuition and ingenuity”.

Alexander and his parents fled Nazi Germany and became stateless. During the war, he was educated in an internment camp, and he discovered his outstanding mathematical skills after entering the University of Montpellier. The real breakthrough came when he was asked to solve 14 hitherto unsolved math problems. Over the course of a year, he dealt with everyone.

His lectures at Harvard and MIT were legendary not only for their content but also for their style. The speed with which he wrote on the boards gave an insight into the thoughts that fueled his hand. His students reported that he wrote down mathematical theorems so quickly that they could not keep up with their reading.

In 1960, at the age of 32, Grothendieck began to withdraw from actively practicing his beloved field. He supported pacifists and ecologists. In 1966, he refused to attend the Fields Medal ceremony in Moscow. In this way he protested against the imprisonment of Soviet writers. In 1970, at the age of 42, he quit his job at the Paris institute supporting advanced research in mathematics and theoretical physics (IHES) because he was funded by the French Ministry of Defense and devoted himself to the fight against nuclear weapons. His obsession with the ecological apocalypse was revealed.

From then on, the retreat from mathematics and society became clearer with each passing year. He first moved to a solitude in the village of Villecun, where he began writing a thousand-page treatise on the interconnection of all things. Later, he chose the tiny village of Lasserre as his place of retreat, where he died in 2014 at the age of 86. He did not receive letters, he did not maintain contacts with his neighbors. He didn’t usually let guests he used to receive. And if he agreed to take them in, he quickly exploded with uncontrolled anger and kicked them out of the house. He collected tiny shoots of various plants in the garden, he brought them home to look after each one individually.

In the mid-80s, Grothendieck agreed to meet Roy Lisker, an American who had written an article about him in Le Monde. Lisker found him dressed in a medieval peasant costume, without teeth, hurling curses at him because he had changed three words in Grothendieck’s original text.

The mathematician believed that he was in contact with Plato and Descartes, and even with God himself. After his death, one hundred thousand pages of notes were found at home in Lasserre, written in such a way that they were difficult to comprehend.

What the science says

Researchers at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden have found that the brains of healthy, highly creative people are in some ways similar to the brains of schizophrenics.

They examined the “creative” brains, focusing on the dopamine system, which is linked to psychotic symptoms. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, a chemical produced in our bodies that transmits messages between neurons. It takes part in cognitive processes such as learning, receiving rewards and punishments.

The results showed that highly creative people have fewer D2 receptors in the thalamus than in “average people”. This means that fewer dopamine molecules can bind to neurons. Dr. Fredrik Ullén, a scientist at the Karolinska Institutet, emphasized that schizophrenic patients have a similarly low D2 density in this part of the brain.

The thalamus acts as a filter that filters out signals before they reach the cerebral cortex. The smaller the number of D2 receptors, the lower the level of signal filtering. Failure to filter out seemingly irrelevant information leads to both creative ideas and disordered thoughts. When more information reaches the consciousness, it favors the formation of links between not yet related concepts. The firewall applies to both senseless ideas characteristic of psychosis and creative thinking.

To use this cascade of information in an innovative way and to manage it efficiently, high intelligence is useful.

Rex Jung, a neuropsychologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque who studies creativity and intelligence. stated that above-average intelligence can not only optimize thought processes, but also delay or prevent mental illness in people prone to them. Men usually develop schizophrenia around the age of 20. However, Grothendieck and Nash had no psychotic symptoms at this age. In Nash’s case, they appeared around thirty, and in Grothendieck’s, middle-aged.

– It is worth noting that many myths have been created about both geniuses and people with schizophrenia – says Małgorzata Piotrowska-Półrolnik, neurocognitive scientist, PhD student at the SWPS University in Warsaw.

– Of course, this topic is controversial. In 2018, researchers (Acar, Chen, and Cayirdag) analyzed data from a number of previously published scientific articles, examining the general direction of research findings on the relationship between schizophrenia and creativity. It turned out, inter alia, that if people with schizophrenia exhibit mild severity of symptoms, it may be a condition that supports creativity, while complete demonstration of schizophrenia symptoms will reduce it.

See also:

1. Mitomania – what is the pathological lie?
2. Confabulation – what is it and can it be treated?
3. Mental disorders will get Poles

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