Mad mathematicians of the twentieth century
A lot of studies shows that there is a link between genius and insanity, and that genius, specially in mathematics may actually be the effect of mental illnesses like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder!
This is perhaps why mathematicians prefer to live apart from others, this is the case of the Russian Grigori Perelman who lives as a hermit and refused all prizes awarded to him. Or live away from standards, this is the case of the two characters mentioned below.
John Forbes Nash
American born in 1928, he has a dedicated film, "A Beautiful Mind", made in 2001 where he is played by Russell Crowe. He co-allocates a Nobel Prize in 1994 although he spent most of his life in a psychiatric hospital from 1959, when his wife becomes pregnant and because her demand for it (she was afraid for her child). He was 30. As Turing, he was gay.
His passions are number theory, quantum mechanics, the theory of relativity among others. When the effects of his illness, his paranoid schizophrenia arises, he sees spies around him he is the only one to see.
Pursued by invisible enemies, he requested political asylum in France, then in East Germany. These countries did not see the enemies in question, so it was denied. France must arrest him because of problems it causes and the U.S. asked to bring him home, although he decided to renounce his American citizenship.
He always considered staying in psychiatry as forced and intended to impose the reality of a rational world, the opposite of eccentric fantasy world in which he preferred to live. He divorced in 1963 and remarried the same woman in 2001.
Alan Turing
Some see him as the inventor of the computer although it owes more to Jacquart (1801), in Babbage whose difference engine (1821) was programmed by Ada Lovelace, Booles whose algebra allows to manufacture electronic circuits, Stibbitz (1937), Shannon (1937) and especially Von Neumann for computer architecture (1946), still used today. He is also attributed the discovery of the Enigma coding of the German army, which helped the allies to win. However, this discovery is claimed by Poland which attributes it to three mathematicians, Marian Rejewski Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski. It had passed it in 1939 with replica of Enigma to France and Britain. Turing has only helped accelerate the decoding.
Following a chemical castration based on hormones that was imposed by the English justice due to his homosexuality, he was endowed, this is a side effect, a woman's breasts. This is the irony of history when we know he wanted to allow men to procreate. In the essay Computing Machinery and Intelligence he envisages the possibility for a man to make himself a child, and do without the woman.
He looked 70 times a Walt Disney movie telling the story of Snow White. In 1954 he committed suicide by coating an apple cyanide before the crunch, and dies as well as his heroine.
