Academics with interesting lives

Alan Turing: mathematician and philosopher; randy; gay; wore a full government issue gas mask as he cycled to work so as to avoid hayfever; had his house ransacked by the friend of a bloke he picked up—he reported the incident to the police but was himself arrested when they discovered he was gay (at a time when it was illegal); killed himself when he reached 41 years of age—a cyanide coated apple, à la wicked witch.

Richard Montague: logician, linguist, and philosopher; randy; gay; once had his house ransacked by a group of people he picked up (they tied him to a chair, but what followed wasn’t what he’d hoped for); murdered at the age of 41—strangled with a bath towel, after which his car was stolen, crashed, and set on fire. The killers were never found.

Kurt Gödel: logician, mathematician; worried that his food was being poisoned so he starved himself to death. Famous for his completeness proof of predicate logic, followed shortly by an incompleteness proof for Peano-like arithmetic (and—roughly—stuff which has induction in).

Think I may have found one for psychology. Well psychoanalysis.  Viktor Tausk: “On the morning of July 3 1919 after Helene Deutsch had stopped Tausk’s treatment, Freud had demanded it, and after a complicated ménage à trois with Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Tausk committed suicide.”  Though a colleague has disputed this claim, as fun as it sounds.

John Maynard Keynes. I know only a tiny bit about Keynes. He’s most famous for being an economist. More fun, he did work on logical theories of probability (see Donald Gillies’ Philosophical Theories of Probability). Gay and randy, it would seem, he kept a sex diary, tallying activities every quarter under the three categories C, A, and W. C has the highest tally. Much debate over what the letters stand for.

“All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo”

“This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that’s what I had.” —Steve Jobs

(Someone once commented of my flat: “all you have is music and books.”)

From Diana Walker’s The Bigger Picture. (Hat tip: ana.)

Theodore Kaczynski

Thanks to (Dopamine) Rob I have (re)discovered Theodore J. Kaczynski, otherwise known as the Unabomber. I remember hearing about him on the news—back when he was arrested, I guess—but I hadn’t quite absorbed the interesting aspects of his biography. Aside from the posting of mail bombs, he was a brilliant mathematician. He graduated from Harvard, got a PhD from Michigan in geometric function theory, and then taught at Michigan for a few years, publishing several papers. I’ll let you follow the links to find out more; I just want to point to some sections of his political essay, Industrial Society and Its Future. In this essay he basically argues that modern society has made people miserable. He targets a few groups of people in particular—most amusing I found were his views on leftists and scientists.

He argues that leftists tend to have “low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred”, and that they are “overly socialised”, i.e., he argues, “to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin”.

His description of oversocialisation:

“The majority of people engage in a significant amount of naughty behavior. They lie, they commit petty thefts, they break traffic laws, they goof off at work, they hate someone, they say spiteful things or they use some underhanded trick to get ahead of the other guy. The oversocialized person cannot do these things, or if he does do them he generates in himself a sense of shame and self-hatred. The oversocialized person cannot even experience, without guilt, thoughts or feelings that are contrary to the accepted morality; he cannot think “unclean” thoughts. And socialization is not just a matter of morality; we are socialized to conform to many norms of behavior that do not fall under the heading of morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on a psychological leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down for him.”

On scientists, he has to say the following:

“With possible rare exceptions, their [scientists'] motive is neither curiosity nor a desire to benefit humanity but the need to go through the power process: to have a goal (a scientific problem to solve), to make an effort (research) and to attain the goal (solution of the problem). Science is a surrogate activity because scientists work mainly for the fulfillment they get out of the work itself. [...] Other motives do play a role for many scientists. Money and status for example. Some scientists may be persons of the type who have an insatiable drive for status and this may provide much of the motivation for their work. No doubt the majority of scientists, like the majority of the general population, are more or less susceptible to advertising and marketing techniques and need money to satisfy their craving for goods and services…”

A truly amusing read.

Florence Nightingale

A little bio of Florence Nightingale, statistician and nurse. Excerpt:

“Nightingale helped to promote what was then a revolutionary idea (and a religious one for her) that social phenomena could be objectively measured and subjected to mathematical analysis. Her work with medical statistics was so impressive that she was elected (in 1858) to membership in the Statistical Society of England. One of the pioneers in the graphic method of presentation of data, she invented colorful polar-area diagrams to dramatize medical data. Although other methods of persuasion had failed, her statistical approach convinced military authorities, Parliament, and Queen Victoria to carry out her proposed hospital reforms.”

[Photo of her Polar Area Diagram ("coxcomb") from over here.]

“A mind taut with pain”

Spotted this in the Times the other day: a moving first-person description of what it feels like to suffer from psychosis and depression.

Be nice

Be especially nice to the servitors. I’m a bit hazy on the details, but apparently the concept of overtime has been removed and they have all been put on flexitime. (Maybe just one department – I’m not sure.) Many relied on overtime to get a decent wage so I suspect there are some less than happy campers around.