So, I was doing some research to see if anyone had ever investigated or explored the idea of purposely becoming obsessed with mathematics as a strategy for eluding the traps and pitfalls all around us.
Here are somethings you might like to check out-please ignore the labels like “Depressives”,”Schizoids” when you read the second excerpt,the psychiatrists cannot help using them:
The Story of Jakow Trachtenberg
In 1934, knowing if he remained in Germany he would be liquidated, Trachtenberg once more fled for his life. Accompanied by his wife, he escaped to Vienna where he became editor of an international scientific periodical.
While the world was preparing for war, Trachtenberg, to further the cause of peace, wrote Das Friedensministerium (The Ministry of Peace), a widely read work, which brought him the plaudits of such statesmen as Roosevelt, Masaryk, and Van Zeeland.
But all over the world peace was dying. The Germans marched on Austria. Trachtenberg's name headed Hitler's most-wanted list. He was seized and thrown into prison.
He managed to escape to Yugoslavia where he and his wife, Alice, lived like hunted animals, rarely venturing out during the day, making no friends or acquaintances. But his freedom was brief. He was awakened one night by the heavy pounding of fists on the door-the Gestapo was calling. Hitler's men had caught up with him.
He was shipped in a cattle car to a concentration camp-one noted for its brutality. The slightest variance from the rules resulted in outrageous forms of punishment. Daily the ranks of the prison were decimated by the ruthlessly random selection of victims for the ovens.
To keep his sanity, Trachtenberg moved into a world of his own-a world of logic and order. While his body daily grew more emaciated, and all about him was pestilence, death, and destruction, his mind refused to accept defeat and followed paths of numbers that, at his bidding, performed miraculous feats.
He did not have books, paper, pen, or pencil. But his mind was equal to the challenge. Mathematics, he believed, was the key to precise thinking. In happier times, he had found it an excellent recreational outlet. In a world gone mad, the calm logic of numbers were like old friends. His mind, arranging and rearranging, found new ways of manipulating them.
He visualized gigantic numbers to be added and he set himself the task of totaling them. And since no one can remember thousands of numbers, he invented a fool-proof method that would make it possible for even a child to add thousands of numbers together without making a mistake-without, in fact, ever adding higher than eleven.
During his long years in the living hell of the concentration camp, every spare moment was spent on his simplified system of mathematics, devising shortcuts for everything from multiplication to algebra. The corruption and misery, the cries from clammy cells and torture chambers, the stench of ovens, the atrocities, and the constant threat of death, faded as he doggedly computed mathematical combinations-reckoning rules, proving and proving again, then starting over again to make the system even simpler.
The hardships acted as a spur to his genius. Lacking paper, he scribbled his theories on bits of wrapping paper, old envelopes, the back of carefully saved German worksheets. Because even these bits of paper were at a premium he worked everything in his head, putting down only the finished theories.
From A BEAUTIFUL MIND by SYLVIA NASAR:
Many great scientists and philosophers, among them Rene Descartes, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Immanuel Kant, Thorstein Veblen,Isaac Newton, and Albert Einstein, have had similarly strange and solitary personalities. An emotionally detached,inward-looking temperament can be especially conducive to scientific creativity, psychiatrists and biographers have long observed.
The Dynamics of Creation,Anthony Storr, the British psychiatrist,contends that an individual who "fears hatred" may turn to creative activity not only out of an impulse to experience aesthetic pleasure, or the delight of exercising an active mind, but also to defend himself against anxiety stimulated by conflicting demands for detachment and human contact." In the same vein, Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher and writer, called genius "the brilliant invention of someone who is looking for a way out." Posing the question of why people often are willing to endure frustration and misery in order to create something, even in the absence of large rewards, Storr speculates:
Some creative people ... of predominately schizoid or depressive temperaments ... use their creative capacities in a defensive way. If creative work protects a man from mental illness, it is small wonder that he pursues it with avidity. The schizoid state ... is characterized by a sense of meaninglessness and futility.
For most people, interaction with others provides most of what they require to find meaning and significance in life. For the schizoid person, however, this is not the case, Creative activity is a particularly apt way to express himself ... the activity is solitary ...
According to John G. Gunderson, a psychiatrist at Harvard, they tend "to engage in solitary activities which often involve mechanical, scientific, futuristic and other non-human subjects ... [and] are likely to appear increasingly comfortable over a period of time by forming a stable but distant network of relationships with people around work tasks."" Men of scientific genius, however eccentric, rarely become truly insane-the strongest evidence for the potentially protective nature.
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