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Comment by sigil | Hacker News Reader

For both individuals and society, all drugs present a dilemma: are they worth the risks to health, wealth and sanity? For me, the pay-off is the scientific inspiration, the wealth of new ideas and the spur to inner exploration.

The most prolific mathematician of all time, Paul Erdős, justified his amphetamine usage in similar terms [1]:

"After 1971 he also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month. Erdős won the bet, but complained that during his abstinence mathematics had been set back by a month: 'Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper.' After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his amphetamine use."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s

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The article in Wikipedia says he was "one of the most prolific publishers of papers in mathematical history", that doesn't mean he was the most prolific mathematician of all time.

What about Euler[1] for example? (I don't think he used drugs though)

Anyway, I agree with your comment in the sense that intelligence, talent or success are not mutually exclusive with drugs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler

But imagine if he had!

How do you measure?

Erdos published more papers with more collaborators than Euler.

Euler published more pages of material and founded more areas of research than Erdos. (Yes, Euler has the benefit of having had people think about his stuff longer, and attribute more to inspiration from him. But Erdos won't ever come close to catching up.)

I think that Arthur Cayley is in third place on both measures.

As long as we are trying to determine causes of people's success, we should consider their location in time.

Imagine if Erdos had been around before Euler? Who's to say that he wouldn't have discovered some or more of what Euler discovered. The earlier discoveries were the easier one, the low-hanging fruit.

If I went back in time it would be easier for me to make some ground breaking discovery, like pythagoras theorem. But today, I need to be smarter and more clever than centuries of mathematicians to add something new to our collective knowledge of the universe. All of the easy problems are solved :(

Of course it would be easy to "discover" the Pythagorean theorem if you went back in time---you already know it.

Now, go back in time and <em>take away all your knowledge</em> (and the knowledge that there was a theorom to be discovered in the first place) and see how easy it would be for you to discover that theorom.

I don't think anyone would argue that drugs is the answer for everybody.

Perhaps some people are blessed with the creativity and vision to see a blank canvas as full of ideas. Other people have to resort to aids to get to that point. Yet otherer people probably couldn't get there even with aids.

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