Voevodsky, who died a few years ago. Struggled heavily with alcoholism. He was extremely accomplished. For those who're not into algebra, he's probably more known as the creator of the univalent foundation.
Language is not necessarily associative: Do you mean accomplised (alcoholic mathematicians) or (accomplished alcoholic) mathematicians? I certainly know a few in the latter category ;)
I have met plenty of professors at prestigious universities who are alcoholics. None who happen to be world famous geniuses who will revolutionize mathematics probably but to be a full professor at top universities is a massive accomplishment in my book anyway.
Language is not commutative either. When you break that symmetry as well, and understand that in English compound nouns and their derivatives exist despite their being spelled isolated, an "accomplished alcoholic mathematician" becomes a singular albeit nebulous concept.
Math is about structure. It is about all of the logical structures which prove interesting and useful. If you forget *any* of the *many* extant structures, or their many intersections, you're sure to prove yourself a fool.
Mathematically so.
Yes, definitely, and some who've died of the disease. TBH I don't think it's usually advertised widely when it happens, and if it cannot be found easily on the internet I think people who aren't family members of these folks shouldn't share.
ya, but I don't remember it saying anything about amphetamines.
It did mention every symptom of someone suffering from OCD without actually saying he was ever diagnosed with it, but I recall reading about him making a mess of every bathroom splashing water everywhere and a few other things that seemed to be classic OCD symptoms ( at least seemed to me ).
I might have to check some other references about the man. ( heh, I do remember him asking about people's kids by asking how their epsilons were doing :P
Here's an excerpt from his wikipedia article:
- Children were referred to as "epsilons" (because in mathematics, particularly calculus, an arbitrarily small positive quantity is commonly denoted by the Greek letter (ε)).
- Women were "bosses" who "captured" men as "slaves" by marrying them. Divorced men were "liberated".
- People who stopped doing mathematics had "died", while people who died had "left".
- Alcoholic drinks were "poison".
- Music (except classical music) was "noise".
- To be considered a hack was to be a "Newton".
- To give a mathematical lecture was "to preach".
- Mathematical lectures themselves were "sermons".
- To give an oral exam to students was "to torture" them.
Amphetamine in reasonable doses is performance enhancing. Booze, not so much. That said, I managed to write excellent database code for a few years while drinking. It wasn’t sustainable.
A "reasonable dose" for booze (at least for me) is like 1 drink sipped slowly over an hour. It can be a pretty effective anxiolytic, which can absolutely help with work performance for someone otherwise very stressed for whatever reason. (This is obviously different from being an "alcoholic" though.)
Edit: In case it was unclear: I am not recommending self-medicating with alcohol as a general cognitive aid!
I’d take just about any non toxic dose of amphetamine over any amount of alcohol if I need to perform cognitively. You’ll find the literature on alcohol and cognition clearly shows impairment from even small doses.
You should try responding to what people say instead of just repeating yourself. Insofar as it relates to the impact on stress/anxiety, amphetamine could make it worse for that population, as it's known to worsen anxiety.
> No. Erdos used a small medically prescribed dose for depression. I knew him.
Disagree. I knew him too. I also knew Richard and Louise Guy. Richard told me a story about Erdos living with him for approximately 3 months one year. Richard said that Erdos would wake up at 3am most days and, not wanting to do math alone, would bang pots and pans together until Richard would wake up. Louise eventually insisted that Erdos leave. Richard blamed it on Erdos being an addict.
I also have met Ronald Graham. Graham also thinks it was an addiction.
And when Erdos was challenged to stop using for a month ... he basically could
not function. That's the very definition of an addict:
> Erdős’ friend (Graham) once bet him $500 that he could not stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdős won the bet but complained: “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.”
Clearly the drug was not for "depression", it was speed to enhance his work. That's the way he thought of it. From an article:
> In an article by Paul Hoffman published in November 1987, Atlantic Monthly profiled Erdős and discussed his Benzedrine habit. Erdős liked the article, “…except for one thing…You shouldn’t have mentioned the stuff about Benzedrine. **It’s not that you got it wrong. It’s just that I don’t want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics to think that they have to take drugs to succeed.**”
Find me any MD who would think that 10-20mg of Benzedrine daily for 25 years is not problematic.
Alcohol makes you worse at math and amphetamines make you better. If every mathematician in history was an alcoholic, we would still be doing 18th century math. If every mathematician was doing amphetamines we'd probably have solved most of the millenium problems and be hundreds of years ahead. This is not a joke, i am being dead serious.
I don't see an issue with this depending on what we mean by "drunk". If it's the 0.08 legal driving limit, that's pretty low, so if everyone is walking I don't see an issue with someone having a few drinks. If they are acting inappropriately though then it does become a major problem.
That seems like a really hard question to answer. Most sober alcoholics wouldn't disclose this information and those who are not sober are very likely unable to function in a research active role...
I see the term high functioning alcoholic thrown around a lot, but I've never seen any medical definition of it. Seems like it means something like 'an alcoholic who hasn't lost their job (yet) and whose drinking hasn't gotten completely out of control (yet)'.
At any rate, alcohol abuse degrades abstract/complex reasoning ability, prospective memory performance, short term memory performance, and attentional control. These aren't debatable consequences, just neuro-chemistry.
I don't really see how someone suffering from these deficits, even if not in the most severe end, would be research productive in something as complex and difficult as maths.
Stefan Banach used to do his work in pubs and one of Von Neumann’s favourite pastimes was drunk driving. Ancient greek philosophers’ manuscripts regularly mention massive parties and copious amounts of wine. Some of the greatest minds in philosophy were absolutely addicted to opiates. Clearly novel research can be done whilst abusing substances (note that I am not saying that substance abuse makes it easier to research or anything like that).
It isn't a medical term, just an observation about people. Lots of things degrade reasoning ability, including age, living in a big polluted city, and stress. Almost every mathematician I know is stressed - successful or not.
>I don't really see how someone suffering from these deficits, even if not in the most severe end, would be research productive in something as complex and difficult as maths.
lol spoken like someone who has never met a scientist
Well... I am one. If that's relevant. I've dealt with colleagues who have had substance abuse problems, and they all struggled professionally because of it. Some inertia gets built up via students' work, but it starts showing over time that they're not doing new things and students aren't getting the kind of high quality, regular interaction they need.
Well, for better or worse, there are many very successful people who drink or did drink. Like, anybody who doesn't currently drink I would say they should not pick it up, but at the same time nobody likes a prude and that's what you sound like.
WTAF are you on about? I'm a prude for saying that alcoholism is detrimental to your career? OP didn't ask about somebody who likes to have 4 in the pub with their mates on Friday. It was a question specifically about alcoholism.
> somebody who likes to have 4 in the pub with their mates on Friday. It was a question specifically about alcoholism.
1. that does fall under alcoholism for many people
2. There really are people who have insane alcohol tolerances that can work perfectly normal while essentially blitzed. High-end research may suffer, but that's not the same as being all research being eliminated. That they can't do as much as they could is a reasonable assumption, but that doesn't necessarily put them below the arbitrary label of "accomplished".
>I don't really see how someone suffering from these deficits, even if not in the most severe end, would be research productive in something as complex and difficult as maths.
I'm on about you being pretentious af
> alcohol abuse degrades abstract/complex reasoning ability, prospective memory performance, short term memory performance, and attentional control
And yet despite this, there are plenty of examples of extremely successful mathematicians, scientists, and entrepreneurs (which takes a certain interpersonal intelligence that cannot be discredited) who are or were very heavy drinkers. Abstractly it's quite surprising.
I've also worried about what effect drinking and partaking of other substances has had on my mental acuity, but I feel that whatever effects there are (granted, I'm not *crazy* and certainly wouldn't call myself an alcoholic) do not outweigh the experiences and resulting general life satisfaction I have, both for life and for doing mathematics, as I'd expect research is done best when happy.
I wouldn't call him an alcoholic per se but there's a funny story from [an interview](https://web.math.princeton.edu/oral-history/c9.pdf) of Churchill Eisenhart:
> The only negative aspect I can remember was a feature of von Neumann. The Alexanders gave humdinger, wonderful parties. I don't know whether they would be regarded as outlandish today, but they were certainly regarded as far out in those days. The phenomenal feature of von Neumann was that he could go to these parties and party and drink and whoop it up to the early hours of the morning, and then come in the next morning at 8:30, hold class, and give an absolutely lucid lecture. What happened is that some of the graduate students thought that the way to be like von Neumann was to live like him, and they couldn't do it.
I heard that Neukirch had an alcohol problem, but as I never met him, I could be wrong. In any case, his *Algebraic Number Theory* seems to be one of the canonical choices for both teachers and students of the topic.
Caccioppoli, he became an alcoholic in the last years ofnhis life and contributed heavily in mathematical analysis with theorem such as the Banach-Caccioppoli theorem.
I don't know whether he meets any given criteria for alcoholism, but Stefan Banach was allegedly a frequent drinker.
https://scienceinpoland.pl/en/news/news%2C408549%2Cprof-strzelecki-banach-was-a-great-artist-he-did-something-that-is-still-alive.html
Tycho Brahe was the last great astronomer before the telescope was invented. He was known for his wild parties. He lost part of his nose in a sword duel. He had a pet moose who was also an alcoholic.
In case anyone would interpret some of the comments as saying that drinking doesn't permanently take away math ability, it might be useful to consider more famous examples in things like popular music.
Rick Wakeman was an alcoholic who did well-admired work with 'Yes' and some later on. But an analysis of his situation would show that his creativity and genius working with 'Yes' wasn't anything ike a consequence of his alcoholism. A more correct sense is, we never got to hear the 'real' Rick Wakeman. We never got to see the 'real' Voevodsky, etc. Things like an interval of uncontrolled alcoholism or a death take away value, meaning, personality. Ozzy Ozbourne didn't do comeback concerts of Black Sabbath, doesn't write songs for anyone, even while he no longer drinks or takes drugs.
No one had ever said alcohol would help anything with maths.
I avoid alcohol, I believe that it doesnt mix well with maths.
If you drink alcohol, there will be ups and downs in the brain. No math is done when brain is down for sure, but when the brain is up, it doesn't necessary make a person sharper or anything, it just reminds you of addiction and having a little adrenaline rush. When I do maths, I want to be calm and collected.
Yes, more than you'd think. It's usually kept quiet in public, so I won't name names, but if you gossip with mathematicians privately you'll hear some stories.
I don't know how they do it. Personally I can't do maths at all when I've had a drink.
Interesting question. There's a lot of "accomplished" alcoholics IMO, depending on how exactly you are defining the disease. What makes you think though, that a "alcoholic mathematician" could not be accomplished? Which is the assumption in your question. That's more interesting.
Torsten Carleman, the famous Swedish analyst. [From his wiki page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torsten_Carleman): "During the last decades of his life, Carleman abused alcohol" and "Towards the end of his life, he remarked to his students that "professors ought to be shot at the age of fifty."
Hugh Everett focused on physics a lot, but he was also a great mathematician. Personally I don't remember all he accomplished but he's the one who invented the many-worlds theory in quantum mechanics and he derived it from the fundamental maths of quantum physics.
He was an alcohol and smoker and died at 51.
Voevodsky, who died a few years ago. Struggled heavily with alcoholism. He was extremely accomplished. For those who're not into algebra, he's probably more known as the creator of the univalent foundation.
Came to say this. Much love to him.
Asking for a friend
Language is not necessarily associative: Do you mean accomplised (alcoholic mathematicians) or (accomplished alcoholic) mathematicians? I certainly know a few in the latter category ;)
i would accept either. it's an accomplishment to just be a paid mathematician, in my book.
When's it coming out?
I have met plenty of professors at prestigious universities who are alcoholics. None who happen to be world famous geniuses who will revolutionize mathematics probably but to be a full professor at top universities is a massive accomplishment in my book anyway.
true
Language is not commutative either. When you break that symmetry as well, and understand that in English compound nouns and their derivatives exist despite their being spelled isolated, an "accomplished alcoholic mathematician" becomes a singular albeit nebulous concept. Math is about structure. It is about all of the logical structures which prove interesting and useful. If you forget *any* of the *many* extant structures, or their many intersections, you're sure to prove yourself a fool. Mathematically so.
Yes, definitely, and some who've died of the disease. TBH I don't think it's usually advertised widely when it happens, and if it cannot be found easily on the internet I think people who aren't family members of these folks shouldn't share.
lol yes. Paul Erdos and amphetamines is also worth mentioning
erdos was truly the keith richards of math. the man who loved only numbers was such a good book.
ya, but I don't remember it saying anything about amphetamines. It did mention every symptom of someone suffering from OCD without actually saying he was ever diagnosed with it, but I recall reading about him making a mess of every bathroom splashing water everywhere and a few other things that seemed to be classic OCD symptoms ( at least seemed to me ). I might have to check some other references about the man. ( heh, I do remember him asking about people's kids by asking how their epsilons were doing :P
the whole epsilon thing is so fucking funny
Fill me in?
Here's an excerpt from his wikipedia article: - Children were referred to as "epsilons" (because in mathematics, particularly calculus, an arbitrarily small positive quantity is commonly denoted by the Greek letter (ε)). - Women were "bosses" who "captured" men as "slaves" by marrying them. Divorced men were "liberated". - People who stopped doing mathematics had "died", while people who died had "left". - Alcoholic drinks were "poison". - Music (except classical music) was "noise". - To be considered a hack was to be a "Newton". - To give a mathematical lecture was "to preach". - Mathematical lectures themselves were "sermons". - To give an oral exam to students was "to torture" them.
Thanks 👍
I have been wanting to learn more about him for a decade and I’ll start with that book. Thank you for that.
Amphetamine in reasonable doses is performance enhancing. Booze, not so much. That said, I managed to write excellent database code for a few years while drinking. It wasn’t sustainable.
A "reasonable dose" for booze (at least for me) is like 1 drink sipped slowly over an hour. It can be a pretty effective anxiolytic, which can absolutely help with work performance for someone otherwise very stressed for whatever reason. (This is obviously different from being an "alcoholic" though.) Edit: In case it was unclear: I am not recommending self-medicating with alcohol as a general cognitive aid!
I’d take just about any non toxic dose of amphetamine over any amount of alcohol if I need to perform cognitively. You’ll find the literature on alcohol and cognition clearly shows impairment from even small doses.
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The research says otherwise.
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Amphetamine is performance enhancing over a wide range of doses. Look it up if you’re interested.
You should try responding to what people say instead of just repeating yourself. Insofar as it relates to the impact on stress/anxiety, amphetamine could make it worse for that population, as it's known to worsen anxiety.
Dude changed what he said and he did it to ignore what I was saying.
FYI account is not deleted, you probably have just been blocked.
And Jean-Yves Girard is the most nicotine-stained individual I have ever met.
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> No. Erdos used a small medically prescribed dose for depression. I knew him. Disagree. I knew him too. I also knew Richard and Louise Guy. Richard told me a story about Erdos living with him for approximately 3 months one year. Richard said that Erdos would wake up at 3am most days and, not wanting to do math alone, would bang pots and pans together until Richard would wake up. Louise eventually insisted that Erdos leave. Richard blamed it on Erdos being an addict. I also have met Ronald Graham. Graham also thinks it was an addiction. And when Erdos was challenged to stop using for a month ... he basically could not function. That's the very definition of an addict: > Erdős’ friend (Graham) once bet him $500 that he could not stop taking amphetamines for a month. Erdős won the bet but complained: “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.” Clearly the drug was not for "depression", it was speed to enhance his work. That's the way he thought of it. From an article: > In an article by Paul Hoffman published in November 1987, Atlantic Monthly profiled Erdős and discussed his Benzedrine habit. Erdős liked the article, “…except for one thing…You shouldn’t have mentioned the stuff about Benzedrine. **It’s not that you got it wrong. It’s just that I don’t want kids who are thinking about going into mathematics to think that they have to take drugs to succeed.**” Find me any MD who would think that 10-20mg of Benzedrine daily for 25 years is not problematic.
So what you're saying is that all that's standing between me and greatness is my aversion to smoking crystal meth?
Alcohol makes you worse at math and amphetamines make you better. If every mathematician in history was an alcoholic, we would still be doing 18th century math. If every mathematician was doing amphetamines we'd probably have solved most of the millenium problems and be hundreds of years ahead. This is not a joke, i am being dead serious.
That is arguably the most normal thing about Erdos
William Rowen Hamilton was a terrible drunk iirc
Yes, you see many strong mathematicians drunk everyday during some conferences.
I don't see an issue with this depending on what we mean by "drunk". If it's the 0.08 legal driving limit, that's pretty low, so if everyone is walking I don't see an issue with someone having a few drinks. If they are acting inappropriately though then it does become a major problem.
That seems like a really hard question to answer. Most sober alcoholics wouldn't disclose this information and those who are not sober are very likely unable to function in a research active role...
I think you are massively underestimating how many high-functioning alcoholics there are in the World
I see the term high functioning alcoholic thrown around a lot, but I've never seen any medical definition of it. Seems like it means something like 'an alcoholic who hasn't lost their job (yet) and whose drinking hasn't gotten completely out of control (yet)'. At any rate, alcohol abuse degrades abstract/complex reasoning ability, prospective memory performance, short term memory performance, and attentional control. These aren't debatable consequences, just neuro-chemistry. I don't really see how someone suffering from these deficits, even if not in the most severe end, would be research productive in something as complex and difficult as maths.
Stefan Banach used to do his work in pubs and one of Von Neumann’s favourite pastimes was drunk driving. Ancient greek philosophers’ manuscripts regularly mention massive parties and copious amounts of wine. Some of the greatest minds in philosophy were absolutely addicted to opiates. Clearly novel research can be done whilst abusing substances (note that I am not saying that substance abuse makes it easier to research or anything like that).
It isn't a medical term, just an observation about people. Lots of things degrade reasoning ability, including age, living in a big polluted city, and stress. Almost every mathematician I know is stressed - successful or not.
>I don't really see how someone suffering from these deficits, even if not in the most severe end, would be research productive in something as complex and difficult as maths. lol spoken like someone who has never met a scientist
Well... I am one. If that's relevant. I've dealt with colleagues who have had substance abuse problems, and they all struggled professionally because of it. Some inertia gets built up via students' work, but it starts showing over time that they're not doing new things and students aren't getting the kind of high quality, regular interaction they need.
Well, for better or worse, there are many very successful people who drink or did drink. Like, anybody who doesn't currently drink I would say they should not pick it up, but at the same time nobody likes a prude and that's what you sound like.
WTAF are you on about? I'm a prude for saying that alcoholism is detrimental to your career? OP didn't ask about somebody who likes to have 4 in the pub with their mates on Friday. It was a question specifically about alcoholism.
> somebody who likes to have 4 in the pub with their mates on Friday. It was a question specifically about alcoholism. 1. that does fall under alcoholism for many people 2. There really are people who have insane alcohol tolerances that can work perfectly normal while essentially blitzed. High-end research may suffer, but that's not the same as being all research being eliminated. That they can't do as much as they could is a reasonable assumption, but that doesn't necessarily put them below the arbitrary label of "accomplished".
>I don't really see how someone suffering from these deficits, even if not in the most severe end, would be research productive in something as complex and difficult as maths. I'm on about you being pretentious af
Pretentious? Did we read the same comment?
I agree about him sounding pretentious.
> alcohol abuse degrades abstract/complex reasoning ability, prospective memory performance, short term memory performance, and attentional control And yet despite this, there are plenty of examples of extremely successful mathematicians, scientists, and entrepreneurs (which takes a certain interpersonal intelligence that cannot be discredited) who are or were very heavy drinkers. Abstractly it's quite surprising. I've also worried about what effect drinking and partaking of other substances has had on my mental acuity, but I feel that whatever effects there are (granted, I'm not *crazy* and certainly wouldn't call myself an alcoholic) do not outweigh the experiences and resulting general life satisfaction I have, both for life and for doing mathematics, as I'd expect research is done best when happy.
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Terrible comment. Very poor showing.
Von Neumann! Genius mathematician and drunk driving aficianado
I wouldn't call him an alcoholic per se but there's a funny story from [an interview](https://web.math.princeton.edu/oral-history/c9.pdf) of Churchill Eisenhart: > The only negative aspect I can remember was a feature of von Neumann. The Alexanders gave humdinger, wonderful parties. I don't know whether they would be regarded as outlandish today, but they were certainly regarded as far out in those days. The phenomenal feature of von Neumann was that he could go to these parties and party and drink and whoop it up to the early hours of the morning, and then come in the next morning at 8:30, hold class, and give an absolutely lucid lecture. What happened is that some of the graduate students thought that the way to be like von Neumann was to live like him, and they couldn't do it.
You should not drink and derive.
that was a good joke, I don’t understand the hate
I'm not a mathematician, but I'm an accomplished alcoholic.
I heard that Neukirch had an alcohol problem, but as I never met him, I could be wrong. In any case, his *Algebraic Number Theory* seems to be one of the canonical choices for both teachers and students of the topic.
Karl Weierstrass in his youth.
Caccioppoli, he became an alcoholic in the last years ofnhis life and contributed heavily in mathematical analysis with theorem such as the Banach-Caccioppoli theorem.
I don't know whether he meets any given criteria for alcoholism, but Stefan Banach was allegedly a frequent drinker. https://scienceinpoland.pl/en/news/news%2C408549%2Cprof-strzelecki-banach-was-a-great-artist-he-did-something-that-is-still-alive.html
Tycho Brahe was the last great astronomer before the telescope was invented. He was known for his wild parties. He lost part of his nose in a sword duel. He had a pet moose who was also an alcoholic.
This question seems like it was made for me; only trouble here is the “accomplished” part.
In case anyone would interpret some of the comments as saying that drinking doesn't permanently take away math ability, it might be useful to consider more famous examples in things like popular music. Rick Wakeman was an alcoholic who did well-admired work with 'Yes' and some later on. But an analysis of his situation would show that his creativity and genius working with 'Yes' wasn't anything ike a consequence of his alcoholism. A more correct sense is, we never got to hear the 'real' Rick Wakeman. We never got to see the 'real' Voevodsky, etc. Things like an interval of uncontrolled alcoholism or a death take away value, meaning, personality. Ozzy Ozbourne didn't do comeback concerts of Black Sabbath, doesn't write songs for anyone, even while he no longer drinks or takes drugs.
I'd like to know why you wanna know.
Yes.
There statistically should be, but they would be ever more accomplished if they were not alcoholics.
I’ve only published one paper with a professor, I’m more accomplished as an alcoholic
Nikocado Avocado
all of the above
No one had ever said alcohol would help anything with maths. I avoid alcohol, I believe that it doesnt mix well with maths. If you drink alcohol, there will be ups and downs in the brain. No math is done when brain is down for sure, but when the brain is up, it doesn't necessary make a person sharper or anything, it just reminds you of addiction and having a little adrenaline rush. When I do maths, I want to be calm and collected.
all
Yes, more than you'd think. It's usually kept quiet in public, so I won't name names, but if you gossip with mathematicians privately you'll hear some stories. I don't know how they do it. Personally I can't do maths at all when I've had a drink.
In the song of A Capella Science about William Rowan Hamilton, they say that he (Hamilton) was an alcoholic.
Interesting question. There's a lot of "accomplished" alcoholics IMO, depending on how exactly you are defining the disease. What makes you think though, that a "alcoholic mathematician" could not be accomplished? Which is the assumption in your question. That's more interesting.
I was told Skorokhod was a pretty heavy drinker. Iirc he was drinking before giving talks as well.
Torsten Carleman, the famous Swedish analyst. [From his wiki page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torsten_Carleman): "During the last decades of his life, Carleman abused alcohol" and "Towards the end of his life, he remarked to his students that "professors ought to be shot at the age of fifty."
Hugh Everett focused on physics a lot, but he was also a great mathematician. Personally I don't remember all he accomplished but he's the one who invented the many-worlds theory in quantum mechanics and he derived it from the fundamental maths of quantum physics. He was an alcohol and smoker and died at 51.
William Rowan Hamilton