Math geniuses and the rest of us

I’ve been reading about mathematical geniuses the past few weeks. I read Simon Singh’s book “The Code Book” and that sort of got me started. I owned an unread book on Kurt Gödel called Incompleteness that I started reading after that. That’s lead me to G.H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology and a book on the Indian math genius Ramanujan called The Man Who Knew Infinity. All illustrate (1) how hard it is to be a genius (2) that even other geniuses will misunderstand you and (3) how ordinary and unimportant everyone else is.

In Hardy’s case he tried to commit suicide when he realized he didn’t have the mathematical creativity of his youth. (It’s an old rule that nobody over 40 discovers anything significant in math) His friend C.P. Snow encouraged him to write a book explaining why he loved math, which he did. After it was published he succeeded at killing himself.

All of them had it easy. Try going to a jobby job 40 hours a week and being aware of your own mediocrity. I’ll trade all of that for the cushy life of an Oxford prof who was only the fifth best mathematician in the world, or an intellectual in the Vienna Circle.

Still it is exciting to read about their struggles to refine their big ideas, or the enormous ramifications of something like Gödel’s Incompleteness proof. I only wish we spent as much time on mathematicians and scientists in history class as we spent on politicians and generals. The mathematicians and scientists have a bigger, longer term impact on how the world works. I can’t believe I came out of high school knowing more about Eli Whitney than Wittgenstein, Gödel or Euclid. Learn about Kissinger or Nash equilibriums? Hands down I’ll take Nash equilibriums. They offer me a model for understanding foreign policy. Kissinger’s realpolitik is just another vocab word.