[UA] Avatar: The Mentally Ill Mathematician?

[gaston at math.sunysb.edu]

So I'm reading _Everything And More_, David Foster Wallace's biography of
Georg Cantor, all about Transfinite Numbers.  And it's very funny, and
often mindbendingly difficult.  But the thing is, it opens with the
following:

Facts:
Georg F.L.P. Cantor - Died in a sanitarium in Halle, 1918.
K. Godel : Also dead as a result of mental illness
L. Bultzmann, most important mathematical physicist of the century: Suicide.

He (Wallace) quotes G.K. Chesterton:
"Poets do not go mad; but chess players do.  Mathematicians go mad, and
cashiers; but creative artists very seldom.  I am not attacking logic: I
only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination."

Wallace then says that the danger is not in logic but in abstraction, and
says

"The Mentally Ill Mathematician seems now in some ways to be what the
Knight Errant, Mortified Saint, Tortured Artist, and Mad Scientist have
been for other areas: sort of our Prometheus, the one who goes to
forbidden places and returns with gifts we all can use, but he alone pays
for."

So - a (post) modern incarnation of an avatar first represented by
Prometheus.  The mentally ill mathematician.

Think we can cook up some channels and a taboo?

gaston