“Today I am no longer, as I used to be, the voluntary prisoner of interminable tasks, which so often prevented me from springing into the unknown, mathematical or not. The time of tasks is over for me. If age has brought me something, it is lightness.”
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Didn’t know Grothendieck had ended life as an unhappy messed-up hermit
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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.
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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