alt Hacker NewsI often wonder about stories of relatively short-lived geniuses such as Ramanujan. Is there a timeline where he recovered and continued making discoveries for decades? Is there some correlation between extreme genius in one area and suboptimal physical health? What if he had existed in modern times instead?
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I mean we have one extreme genius who showed promise early and remained exceptionally productive in mathematics for a long career: Leonhard Euler.
"Euler's work averages 800 pages a year from 1725 to 1783. He also wrote over 4500 letters and hundreds of manuscripts. It has been estimated that Leonhard Euler was the author of a quarter of the combined output in mathematics, physics, mechanics, astronomy, and navigation in the 18th century, while other researchers credit Euler for a third of the output in mathematics in that century"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler#Contributions_t...
But of course everyone is interested in the "what if" question of what might have happened had a particular person not died young:
- What if Galois hadn't died in a duel?
- What if Niels Henrik Abel hadn't died of tuberculosis?[1]
- What if Emmy Noether hadn't died of cancer so soon after she started teaching at Bryn Mawr and Princeton?
[1] This one is one of the saddest stories in maths to my view. Abel died in his 20s basically because of extreme poverty and 2 days after he died a letter arrived from one of his friends who had got him a teaching position that would have made him financially secure. Hermite said of Abel "Abel has left mathematicians enough to keep them busy for five hundred years."
And: How do we treat them?
He lived in India. In the early 1900s. The average lifespan in India in 1920 when he died was 21 to 25 years old. He was 32 when he died, so better than the average. The math checks out.
Modern world, not just India, is way worse at talent discovery. It's impossible to even publish a physics paper and get a DOI. There were some new research ideas coming in chinese and hindi during early bitcoin days, all of which were lost to a vocal english population, and some the ideas are only resurfacing now again after 15 years of noise. I know of Shannon-Satoshi level bitcoiner theorist who died in poverty as a janitor in Canada. I know of many ideas that were never discussed, so am sure many such people exit in other fields. Only cause Ramanujan's equations are from a different time and so weird have they survived plagiarism otherwise IP is completely insecure now & intelligent non-smart people are in poor health.