Psychiatrist Nancy Andreasen researched the mad genius stuff in the 80s-90s. She expected to find a link with schizophrenia, but instead found a stronger link between creativity and mood disorders, both unipolar and bipolar. Psychologist Ruth Richards used one of those Scandinavian population registers to demonstrate that family members of mood disorder patients were more creative than the norm, suggesting a biological proclivity. Finally, Kay Redfield Jamison is a clinical psychologist who herself is bipolar and wrote a book on the link between madness and genius: Jamison, Kay Redfield (1993), Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, New York: The Free Press, ISBN 0-02-916030-8 (includes a study of Lord Byron's illness).
None of these authors included autism in their studies, at least as far as I am aware. Remember that our current understanding of Aspergers/Autism didn't really make it into broad-based clinical awareness until the mid-90s and later. I read quite a bit about bipolar and creativity in the 1990s but haven't dipped into that topic since. All the same, for those interested in this topic, the above authors are a place to start.
Thank you for the links. It's a fascinating subject to me, l can already feel myself falling into my autistic rabbit hole and l would like to read about Alexander Grothendieck.
Pythagoras, often described as the first pure mathematican, went on to lead a strange cult. Isaac Newton , Kurt Godel, Florence Nightingale and John Nash all obtained mathematical prominence before succumbing to some type of psychopathology, including depression, delusions, and religious mysticism.
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