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There’s a trend there in super high level mathematicians going off the deep end - Godel, Nash, Kacyznski - Newton had a couple of nervous breakdowns if I recall
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A kind of arrested development I think. For geniuses, math becomes an early and absorbing retreat from reality traumas, and when they finally re-engage reality in late adulthood they only have the intellectual equipment of 12-year-olds to cope. The results are rarely pretty.
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tbh I use how people react to Grothendieck as a kind of a canary for how tolerant they are of eccentrics. People who are shitty about Grothendieck (or Perelman) are people to be wary of.
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