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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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There is also the solace of a science so abstracted from reality that immutably true answers are possible. People uncomfortable with ambiguity find math extraordinarily appealing. Life, unfortunately, is full of ambiguity.
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When repressed feelings make the body a scary place... go hang out in the mind. When enough people are dissociated from the body, some will inevitably come up with exciting math and tech stuff. Western society in a nutshell.
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