Maybe it's my east coast-iness. Coffee, bagels, and the daily paper at the breakfast table equal happiness to me. Yesterday I had two cups of coffee for the first time in about a month. Coffee consumption comes in three stages for me:
Stage One: Universal love. This is when I think, "I wanna rock! Gotta call some old friends. I knew there was a brotherhood of man. Get yer done! etc".
Stage Two: Detached criticism. In this stage I am best at thinking analytically. Not too much emotion. Super rational.
Stage Three: Apocalyptic Brain Hemorrhaging. In this final stage I realize that the first two stages were not worth the finale. "I live in a war zone/ fragility in human nature..." It's sucks.
At some point combining all three stages yesterday I remembered this extreme genius mathematician that my older brother told me about: Paul Erdos. It was said that he came up with the phrase, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into thermos". He was also a meth addict. During WW2 he would knock on the door of friends of his (he was Jewish and had to escape the Nazi force then) and say, "My brain is open, let me in". Then he would work on mathematical theory for a few days and move to his next house. He carried just a suitcase around, drank tons of coffee, and changed the world of mathematics with this sort of lifestyle. A friend bet him that he could not go one month without coffee consumption. Paul Erdos won the bet but said that the world of math was set back an entire month because of his lack of caffeine. As a really horrible side note (and also a testament of his genius), because of the fragile and war torn time he was living, he could calculate the lifespan of his family members down to the second when he was only four years old.
Actually there are a few in the math world that are like this guy. And I have much more respect for them then many other disciplines. I'll do some research and expand this blog. It's green tea time. Coffee was a bad idea yesterday....
Okay two more. I'm tired and want to get this out. Plus these stories really interest me, hopefully you as well.
Evariste Galois. He was a math genius who was challenged to a duel at the age of 20. He knew he was going to die, so he wrote down everything he knew about mathematics the night before the duel. I don't quite understand what his contribution was to the math community (I'll ask around) but I know his theories are still being built on today.
Finally, my favorite, Kurt Godel. Godel proved (in complex mathematical terms) that nothing can be proved in mathematics. Afterwards he went insane and locked himself in his bathroom and starved himself to death. Now there is a man who wants to understand it! (think the lead character
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