With this slightly daring title I hope to discuss my passion for all things that come in groups of three. Now to deflect any possible readers following a late night Google lead, this post will in all likelihood only be sexy to you if you have a strong affinity with numbers and an amusing measure of OCD; like yours truly.

 

As the people around me will know, I like my consumables best in groups of three. I regularly spend time working out how to pick up three peppermints from that-bowl-in-that-restaurant without seeming too greedy; I will always remember having had two peaches and still having to find one; and my boyfriend has worked out how to trick me into eating something (ripping it into three pieces). Five is good too: I live on the fifth floor; I was happy turning 24 (3x(3+5), magic! I had some even nerdier excitement involving dates that I’ll spare you) and I will be when turning 25 too; and so I get slightly uneasy being stuck at four (between my two favourite numbers). All this OCD is more a case for amusement than for worry, though (as I like to maintain): you won’t catch me eating three plates of dinner or counting my rice grains. Still it is a funny little quirk I picked up, and it seems to have developed as I spend more of my time thinking about abstract mathematics. I asked myself the question: is that a coincidence, or are my funny habits a side product of my explorations in the mathematical Universe?

 

Examples of slightly nutty scientists are of course all over popular culture. You may have seen the movie Pi, or A Beautiful Mind (about John Nash), or one of the many documentaries about Boltzmann or Cantor. An example from the ancient Greeks is mathematician Pythagoras and his cult: in Pythagorean philosophy, numbers represented qualities in the world, like justice, and wisdom. In their almost religion-like teachings they sought meaning as harmony between opposites: the odd numbers represented the limited, and the even numbers the unlimited. That has a nice ring to it, but before you convert, you must know that the cult had strange ideas too. They were for instance terrified of beans. It is even claimed that Pythagoras died refusing to cross a bean field while fleeing from attackers!

 

A more recent example is that of Paul Erdös. Erdös was one of the most prolific mathematicians ever, having (co-) authored 1475 academic papers, many of which with great significance. He lived for numbers, travelling the world with only a suitcase and a plastic bag, and famously showed up at fellow mathematicians’ houses to declare, “my brain is open”, in a search for interesting problems and new talent.[1] His colleagues had to put up with his bizarre idiosyncrasies and the trail of destruction he would often leave behind in their kitchens, feeding the pets with cereal or opening a juice box with a meat knife.

 

But my favourite example is the inventor/scientist Nicola Tesla, after whom we call a unit of magnetism (yes, and the cars), who shared my obsession for the number three. Allegedly, he walked around the block three times before he entered buildings, polished his silverware with (3×6=) 18 napkins nightly, and died on the 33^rd floor of the New Yorker Hotel, in room (3×1109=) 3327. This particular affinity makes a little more sense if you know that he was synesthetic.

 

The three (see what I did there?) examples I’ve given here are far from isolated. I don’t have the statistics, but it looks like the notion of a nutty scientist reaches beyond pop culture. As the funny behaviour seems strongly enhanced in late careers in most cases, perhaps you may indeed attribute it to the mental strain of pushing the mind to its limits. In some cases substance use (Erdös) or poisoning (Isaac Newton) may have played a role as well. But it seems like a chicken-and-egg question to ask if the disposition for peculiar patterns is something innate (perhaps what draws us to the language of mathematics in the first place?) or a side product of abstract thinking. I’d love to hear your thoughts over my third cup of coffee.

 

[1] There is even such a thing as an “Erdös number”, which is determined by how many publications you are removed from Erdös (in analogy with “how many handshakes”).

 

Links:
Mathematics and Insanity
Pythagoras
Paul Erdös
Nikola Tesla