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Comment by stareatgoats | Hacker News Reader

An interesting, and sad story: that such a beautiful mind ended up with paranoia. It seems to be a real danger that many geniuses run, maybe in part (pardon the speculation) because they tend to work too hard: "Grothendieck was working on the foundations of algebraic geometry seven days a week, twelve hours a day, for ten years". That has to take a toll.

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I'm not sure it was paranoia, he became disillusioned with humanity.

It is important to be careful to not define activities that deviate from normal human behavior as mental illness. We should not expect average human behavior to represent a ceiling on virtue, wisdom, or rationality.

Hey, 'not sure' is supposed to my guiding star! I may have lapsed here, and absolutely agree that we should not define activities that deviate from normal human behavior as mental illness. On the other hand one should not romanticize and define as normal or unproblematic that which is a mental illness either.

Granted I could have dug further. To my defense I just echoed a quote in the article, which states he held a resentment that "eventually metamorphosed into a paranoia which is evident in the pages of Récoltes et Semailles. - Excerpt, "The IHÉS at Forty" by Allyn Jackson (1999)".

I did however do some digging in order to produce this response to your comment, and I found an interesting article about Grothendieck on Psychology Today [0]. It also mentions an apparent trend among some mathematical geniuses to develop mental illness, and it expresses hope that a connection may be found thanks to "advances in the nascent field of creativity-psychopathology neuroscience", of which I know nothing. But I stick to my original speculation: that overworking might be part of it (until I'm convinced otherwise).

As for Grothendieck the author has this to say about the later stages of his life: "He believed himself to be in communication with Plato and Descartes, and even with God himself. The belief in signal transmission is a signature psychotic delusion".

[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/201707/the-mad-g...

Thats interesting, I've heard mathematicians remark that "the study of the theory of infinity sets can lead to madness". I didn't realize that there was actual science behind that.

Thanks for finding those details. I didn't know that Grothendieck was hearing voices.

The archetypal example of the former is Georg Cantor: https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-nature-of-infinity-a...

I became disillusioned with humanity long ago, that still doesn't have anything to do with burning 25000 pages I could have wrote or writing 300-page manuscript about how god exists and talks to us through our dreams.

At least in Grothendieck's case, the boundary between "visionary" and "madman" is not so clear. This is a guy who spent decades pursuing targets nobody else could see, and convincing other people to join him, and the end result was a resounding success for mathematics. The combination of 1. the truth-seeking confidence that comes from pulling that off, and 2. what sounds like a deeply traumatizing childhood at the hands of various governments is a...complicated mixture.

> that such a beautiful mind ended up with paranoia.

there's certainly a pattern here, that people that walk the edge of what a human brain can do often drift to paranoia and/or extremism.

I'm thinking: Bobby Fischer, Grigory Perelman, Évariste Galois, and to a certain extent, Isaac Newton. I suspect the list is a lot longer.

Galois - shot in duel. Turing - committed suicide by cyanide-laced apple. Boltzmann - committed suicide while on vacation. Gödel - died from starvation and exhaustion. Cantor - died from starvation in an insane asylum. Ramanujan - died from malnutrition. de Moivre - predicted the day of his death by calculating his sleep cycle. Lie - became insane and attacked his friends. Erdös - did amphetamines all his life. Nash - was legally insane for 30 years. Perelman - refuses contact with anyone except his mother. Grothendieck - refused contact with anyone. Kaczynski - serving a life sentence in maximum security prison.

Rananujan had a digestive issue IIRC

*Ramanujan

Wow, that's quite the list, but it's a bit weird to see Kaczynski thrown in after all of these mathematical legends.

Also, there was quite a bit more to Godel's death than simply dying "from starvation and exhaustion"!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del#Later_life_and...

I'm afraid Kaczynski is probably more famous than most of them among those not interested in mathematics. And he was an assistant professor of mathematics at UCB when he turned, after all.

Gödel's story is certainly a fascinating one. However, he did have a paranoid fear of being poisoned most of his life and weighed 30kg when he died - of malnutrition.

Maths, not even once.

Erdős took amphetamine in the second half of his life, and apparently it helped him a lot to stay productive. There is a story about it.

Erdős’s friends worried about his drug use, and in 1979 Graham bet Erdős $500 that he couldn’t stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdős accepted, and went cold turkey for a complete month. Erdős’s comment at the end of the month was “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.” He then immediately started taking amphetamines again.

His biography “The Man Who Loved Only Numbers” is a very good interesting book.

An idea of a title for a new book on group theory: Crystal Math.

Turing committed suicide to escape government persecution for being gay. That's not the same as a case like Grothendieck or Nash; it can't fairly be called paranoia when someone really is out to get you.

More exactly turing was suffering due chemical castration mandated by the government, I don't want to imagine what such procedure does to one's mental health.

Given that the regimen at that time involved high doses of some of the same hormones used in MtF HRT today, I suspect it'd be not totally unakin to being forced into severe gender dysphoria, with gynecomastia and permanent sterility as just a couple of the side effects.

I think there's an issue with saying that extremism is necessarily an issue. For most theoretical thinkers, extremism is a necessary result of theory. And there is nothing wrong with that, if extremism in an ideology is an issue it's generally that the ideology itself is problematic.

Kurt Gödel is another sad tale [0]. Died of starvation.

When I was a child, I really enjoyed a book [1] on the topic of brilliant but odd people.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_G%C3%B6del#Later_life_and...

[1] - http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/strange.htm

May certainly add Pitts of McCulloch&Pitts to this sad sequence, cirrhosis.

"Do not lose your faith. A mighty fortress is our mathematics." -Stanislaw Ulam

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