Journey to the Edge of Reason: The life of Kurt Gödel
The article is behind a paywall so I didn&#x27;t get to read the whole thing, but the little I did read suggests that Godel&#x27;s accomplishment is intertwined with his mental illness. It is tempting to romanticize people&#x27;s mental illness and make it out as a strength that allowed to them to accomplish great intellectual feats, but as far as all evidence goes, mental illness absolutely hinders one&#x27;s mental capacity and works against it, rather than something that assists it.<p>Suffering from a mental illness doesn&#x27;t open up a gateway that lets you see into a mysterious universe of abstract concepts and explore things that others can&#x27;t... to the extent that mental illness correlates highly with certain fields like math, computer science, it&#x27;s likely due to the fact that people with good social skills were historically persuaded to enter social fields where they are more likely to deal with people on a day to day basis, such as sales, law, medicine, sports, etc... so that the bulk of people remaining who do not have great social skills are left studying subjects that historically could be studied in solitude.<p>Things are a lot different today than they were 100 years ago. Much of physics, math, computer science is now done in large teams and is a lot more social than it used to be. The people that will be looked up to in the 22nd century will almost certainly not have suffered from a mental illness or have their accomplishment in some sense be related to their illness. They will likely be much more extroverted, social and be recognized relative to a larger team&#x2F;group of people as opposed to today where we often mythologize the mathematicians who were reclusive and had &quot;mysterious&quot; personalities.<p>I imagine the next generation of great thinkers will be more along the lines of a Feynman.