Hacker News Reader

I’m bipolar and when I was first diagnosed with bipolar disorder I was 19 and in my first ever manic episode I dropped out of college and went deep down this particular rabbit-hole in an attempt to solve the Riemann Hypothesis to win the prize. I spent 3 months on it gradually driving myself crazier and crazier. My second company had collapsed out from under me when a sociopathic employee with a gambling addiction had conned me into thinking they were my best friend and meanwhile skimmed all of our profits so it looked like we were barely breaking even right under my nose. (To be fair I was 19) That in combination with a semester of Intro to Philosophy where I read Aristotle and Socrates and a Algebra class I became obsessed with led to me stumbling into the Riemann Hypothesis, and going deep down a rabbit hole in what ultimately turned into my first ever and most intense manic episode and led to my bipolar diagnosis.

I hadn’t even finished college Algebra at the time. I basically spent months playing around with equations on Wolfram Alpha.

The funny thing is this ultimately was kind of a life-changing moment for me, as I learned programming through it which in combination with a family member dying is what finally pulled me out of the mania, and then I changed my major to Computer Science re-enrolled in college and have since actually gone on to get a degree in CS and a minor in math, sometimes I look back at the giant set of Google Docs I created during that time, mostly in amusement but to this day some things I look at and don’t even understand if it is meaningless or not. A part of me wants to pick it back up, but then I tell myself it isn’t worth the risk, I’ve always felt I am uniquely qualified to understand how the guy in the movie “A beautiful mind” felt when he stopped talking/engaging with the hallucinations.

Here’s some links to random Google docs from my ~2017 rabbit hole if anyone is interested. There’s a lot of fairly interesting usage of the Euler-Mascheroni constant and honestly it goes a bit all over the place.

I kind of doubt there’s anything here, but if you’ve ever wanted to peek into unchecked mania.. have fun. It was months of insanity. (Sharing these in good faith!)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CERdyZMlGj76EmMJXt5Zr3pM...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LpKqgCzjo8LrxB547WY5YdVP...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JvV5NJTYaTHn3eSAShcUtE8J...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ej0bNIpYNT30M31pCxx-LDoe...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/13nlw3vbxyRGd6pYeAre8c7e5...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WChBcGtaUdLckPDqNBVGpP9x...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_bQbgJ5HIyv_D5ex9TWK2XxH...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AomtTAP4GBXpOuArvBYQsHiP...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QO8iQ2OmPZkQ7lNS0uUB0uyy...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zzedxz1Ya9rT8N4RZZNtpsrr...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vB0Qbqe0yiO0tcxswl2jniYc...

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K4upBz2awHnKlr5JE1xocntp...