four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing - whose genius... tragically drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.
Correlation does not imply causality.
Not that I see any correlation here -- not by a long shot. I would embark on a census of all the geniuses who did not go insane, but this post is too short to contain it. I will, however, not miss the opportunity to re-quote the first line of Goodstein's States of Matter, IMHO the most hilarious line in physics-education history:
Ludwig Boltzmann, who spend much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906 by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on his work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
Fortunately, most of us survived stat mech.
Finally, while one can obviously dispute the cause of Turing's death, and claim that it might have had something to do with his "genius", it might also have had something to do with the public humiliation, the removal of his security clearance (and thereby, effectively, his career in cryptography), and the disfiguring hormonal treatments that were forced on him by a homophobic society. I mean, you can see how that might have been kind of depressing.
I wonder whether the stereotype of geniuses being manic depressives exists to keep people from being geniuses? Of course, there are manic depressive geniuses, but there are plenty of manic depressive non geniuses. Plus, the stereotype can easily form a self fulfilling prophecy, due to social stigma.
The truth is rather sadder: There are lots of manic depressives among us, but people prefer not to think about them, and their condition is so stigmatized that they do not advertise it.
The only manic depressives that cannot be ignored are the famous ones.
Alternatively, three mentally I'll geniuses and a fourth who was tortured into suicide after great service to his country. (to be fair, I only know about Turing and Godel...)
I'm (slowly) reading Kurt Goedel's incompleteness theorem. In 1931, he developed his own notation and used it to concatenate strings of symbols, merely as a building block in a larger proof. This was at least 10 years before programmers would be able to instruct a running computer to concatenate strings. He'd be a frustrated genius if he had the idea today because most people still don't understand his insights.
Correlation does not imply causality.
Not that I see any correlation here -- not by a long shot. I would embark on a census of all the geniuses who did not go insane, but this post is too short to contain it. I will, however, not miss the opportunity to re-quote the first line of Goodstein's States of Matter, IMHO the most hilarious line in physics-education history:
Ludwig Boltzmann, who spend much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906 by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on his work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.
Fortunately, most of us survived stat mech.
Finally, while one can obviously dispute the cause of Turing's death, and claim that it might have had something to do with his "genius", it might also have had something to do with the public humiliation, the removal of his security clearance (and thereby, effectively, his career in cryptography), and the disfiguring hormonal treatments that were forced on him by a homophobic society. I mean, you can see how that might have been kind of depressing.