[ExI] baby fae

[John Clark]

On Sat, Apr 25, 2020 at 1:52 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> What sort of mental illnesses did these people have - if you know?  We
> all know there is a correlation between IQ and manic-depression. That
> diagnosis might not strike people as being crazy, like a diagnosis of
> schizophrenia and its hallucinations and delusions would, although a full
> blown manic episode would do it.
>

I don't know the technical term for the illness but John Nash went so crazy
they made a very good movie about him, "A Beautiful Mind".

Alexander Grothendieck and Grigori Perelman suddenly renounce mathematics
at the very height of their productivity and became hermits refusing to
talk to anybody for decades; Grothendieck lived on nothing but dandelion
soup and Perelman was offered the Fields Medal, the mathematical equivalent
to the Nobel Prize, but he refused it and for some weird reason thought it
a insult, he even refused a million dollars The Clay Mathematical Institute
wanted to give him as a sign of appreciation for proving the Poincaré
conjecture.

Georg Cantor suffered from chronic depression all his life and it was so
bad he had to be hospitalized for it many times, and the eccentricities of Paul
Erdős were legendary although he seems like a nice guy.

As for
Godel, he was
the

greatest
logician
of all time but he had some very illogical ideas.  Godel
was always a very odd man and he got odder as he got older
especially after his best friend, Albert Einstein, died in 1955
. He sealed his windows shut because he thought somebody
would
 try to murder hi
m
 with poison gas.
He
 wore
a
heavy woolen coat on the hottest day
of summer
,
Godel believed in ghosts
and for unknown reasons he insisted on putting lots of cheap plastic
flamingos on his front lawn.
Godel disliked talking to people but if he had to he insisted they do it on
the telephone even if they were just a few feet away. Godel
 ended up starving himself to death, he refused to eat because he thought
unnamed sinister forces were trying to poison him. The great logician
weighed 65 pounds when he died in 1978 from, according to the
official
death certificate,
"
lack of food brought on by paranoia
"
.

 John K Clark
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