Mark Bennet was the subject of an interesting edition of I Was a Child Prodigy on Radio 4 this week
He was a seriously good mathematician who abandoned an academic career & is now an Anglican priest
One of the reasons he gave for the switch was that the further you go into the world of mathematical ideas, the less you are able to talk to, or communicate with, other people
One of the people who spoke briefly on the programme was a contemporary at Cambridge who has since won the Fielding medal. I don’t know if he is the one I remember reading an interview with at the time. That person made much the same point – he could not even discuss his work with his wife, a fellow mathematician but in a different branch of the subject
There is often a feeling that those who are able to live in the world of mathematical imagination have much in common with those on the autistic spectrum. I do not know enough about this to comment, except to say that one of the signs of autism is supposedly an inability to recognise how others are feeling.
It must be just as difficult to understand how other people think
