Different ways of brain function, such as autism, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, often result in people with unique skills but who have trouble fitting in with society’s norms. Almost by very definition, revolutionary artists, thinkers and inventors are people whose thinking goes beyond the boundaries of normal society. Heterodox thinkers are essential to a healthy society. However, societies have a love-hate relationship with such people.
Some of history’s greatest scientists had brain disorders that resulted in them in being considered eccentric and, sometimes, being outliers to society. The following are three notable examples:
Kurt Godel
Perhaps no one better personifies the old adage that there’s a fine line between genius and insanity than 20th-century Austrian-American mathematician and logician Kurt Godel.
Godel (1906-78) is commonly ranked as one of history’s intellectual giants, on the order of Aristotle, Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, the last who was his colleague and friend. Stanford University mathematics and philosophy professor Solomon Feferman said Godel is “Beyond comparison the most important logician of our times,” and Time magazine included Godel in their ‘100 Greatest Minds of the 20th Century.’
Composed when he was just 25, his incompleteness theorems were considered earth-shattering and today are ranked as landmarks in the history of mathematics and philosophy. These novel mathematical theorems showed that no closed mathematical system can prove everything and cannot be used to even prove its own accuracy. The latter is similar to the philosophical idea that “A human cannot prove the accuracy of his own mind, because he uses this same mind to judge the accuracy.” His theorems were so novel that he had to invent his own mathematical language to explain them.
While vocationally accomplished and acknowledge as brilliant in his lifetime, Godel was almost as well known for his extreme eccentricities and periods of mental instability. The following are a few examples of his curious ideas and ways:
* While a Professor of Mathematics at Princeton New Jerseys’s world-famous Institute for Advanced Studies, he would wear a heavy full-length fur coat outside on the hottest days of summer and leave open the windows and doors of his home on the coldest, snowiest days of winter.
* He stated he didn’t trust common sense and didn’t follow it.
* Near the end of his life he was working to mathematically prove the existence of God.
* Godel was born in Austria and immigrated to the United States as an adult. While studying for the test to become an American citizen, he became convinced that the US Constitution legally allowed for the United States to become a fascist dictatorship. Einstein advised him to keep this theory to himself, for fear voicing it would hinder his chances of becoming a citizen. Unable to contain himself, Godel told his theory to the judge administering the exam. Lucky for Godel, the judge thought Godel was joking and he idly dismissed it. Godel passed the exam and became an American citizen.
* Godel became irrationally paranoid about germs and being poisoned to the point that he only ate food prepared by his wife. When his wife fell ill and was in the hospital unable to cook for him, he starved to death. He didn’t even trust the food he himself made.
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Paul Dirac
Cambridge University professor Paul Dirac was one of the fundamental contributors to quantum mechanics and was the winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize for physics. He was called “Britain’s’ Einstein,” and a “human supercomputer.”
Dirac was autistic and a social misfit. Nobel Prize winner Niels Bohr said that Dirac was “the strangest man.” Albert Einstein wrote, "I am toiling over Dirac. This balancing on the dizzying path between genius and madness is awful."
Dirac took the things people said literally. He was unable to understand the figurative nature of common figures of speech and casual remarks. He rarely spoke, and the running joke with his Cambridge University colleagues was that the 'Dirac unit of measurement' was one word per hour.
A story is at a dinner party a Cambridge colleague of his got up and danced a waltz with a woman. When the colleague returned to the table, Dirac asked him why he did that. The colleague said he enjoyed dancing, that it was fun to dance with and meet women and that many people enjoy dancing with other people. Dirac was still completely mystified.
Dirac was raised in a harsh, authoritarian family, and said that it was not until he was an adult that he learned that some humans like each other. He was unable to handle the normal details of life. His wife took care of the daily tasks, while he focused his attention on physics and mathematics. Some have said that his wife's help was essential to his groundbreaking work.
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Walter Pitts
American mathematician Walter Pitts was one of the key pioneers in artificial intelligence and artificial neural networks in the 1940s-50s. His theoretical work influenced psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and cybernetics.
He was a self-taught child prodigy from working-class Detroit. At the age of twelve and after reading the book at the local library, Pitts wrote a letter to Bertrand Russell pointing out errors in one of Russell's mathematics textbooks. Russell wrote back that Pitts was correct and invited the boy to visit him at the University of Cambridge.
Pitts ran away from home at age 15 and was so eccentric as an adult that he turned down all offers for higher degrees and prestigious positions from many places including M.I.T. and the University of Chicago because it would have required him to sign his name to a document. He did much of his work while homeless.
Recognized by colleagues as a genius with encyclopedic knowledge but an emotionally disturbed misfit, he died a socially isolated alcoholic.