5 Geniuses Who Were a Little Mad
By: Grant Piper
Tags: Mind, Society, People, History, True Story

Not everyone is a genius. True genius comes around infrequently and often unnoticed but every so often people come around with a gift and take the world by storm. No, not everyone is a genius, and upon further examination, it does not seem like many people would want to be geniuses in the first place.

Genius throughout history often comes hand in hand with loneliness, delusion, and madness. In fact, the great philosopher and genius himself Aristotle said:

“No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.”

That seems to be very much the case. Here are five examples of true and proven geniuses who influenced society in major ways and the telltale signs of madness that touched each of them.

1. Nikola Tesla

Photograph of Telsa sitting by one of his coils. (Dickenson V. Alley / Public domain)

What they’re known for

In the title of his book about Nikola Tesla, author Robert Lomas pegs Tesla’s contributions to modern science perfectly by dubbing him “the man who invented the 20th century”. Nikola Tesla’s scientific work was extensive. He was involved in the famous Tesla coils, x-ray, radar, wireless radio, and more. His most well-known contribution to modern society was his championing of Alternating Current (AC) power which is still the global standard for the transmission of electricity to this day.

Tesla’s mind worked like none other. His ideas were wild and creative. He believed that everything could one day be powered from the background energy found in space. He worked on ideas revolving around time travel and teleportation, things that would lead to the eventual field of quantum physics. He was a real and utter genius who also was tinged by a touch of madness.

Evidence of madness

In the 1930s Tesla saw the threat that aerial bombardment posed to large cities such as New York and London and began to feverishly work on the problem. Using his extensive knowledge of physics he claimed to have invented a sort of death ray which could wipe out enemy armies and sweep the skies clean of enemy aircraft.

Tesla described the invention, which was called Teleforce, writing:

“My apparatus projects particles which may be relatively large or of microscopic dimensions, enabling us to convey to a small area at a great distance trillions of times more energy than is possible with rays of any kind. Many thousands of horsepower can thus be transmitted by a stream thinner than a hair, so that nothing can resist.”

He took this idea with him to the grave and never wavered in his claim that he had invented such machines and even became irate at the idea that his invention was any sort of “ray.” Tesla was adamant that his technology was not a ray because rays dissipated far too quickly to be the correct term for what he had created.

He also claimed that he could speak to the pigeons in New York and became obsessed with the number three in his later years.

2. Sir Isaac Newton

The painting “Newton” by William Blake (Public domain)

What they’re known for

Sir Isaac Newton is best known for his contributions to physics. He crafted the “Three Laws of Motion” which are still widely taught today and are the basics of nearly all modern physical calculations and assumptions. Newton’s theories are still tested and proven frequently. His work is so widely accepted that the term Newtonian Physics is commonplace.

He also put in extensive work in the formulation of calculus as well as optics. His work with prisms helped to refine and craft the earliest refracting telescopes and gave his peers a better understanding of the way light worked.

Evidence of madness

In his study of light, Newton locked himself into a darkened room until his eyes had adjusted to the gloom. With his pupils fully dilated, he opened a window and allowed a beam of sunlight to enter and reflect off of a mirror. Newton stood and stared at the bright reflection of the sun until his eyes began to degrade. It was his attempt at trying to look directly at the sun. Naturally, it failed.

He stared through the pain nearly blinding himself. His eyes hurt so badly after his attempt to stare at the sun that he locked himself away for three days.

Newton was said to have often been taken by flights of manic fancy that would push him to do things such as staring at the sun, even if it might blind him.

After his death, it became clear that Newton was obsessed with a great many things. One of the main pursuits of his during life was an obsession with alchemy. Unlike optics, which absorbed him for a brief time during his middle years, it appears that Newton was obsessed with alchemy for decades.

He was so paranoid about his work that many of his papers were hidden away and never read by anyone but himself. Many were even written in code. Newton believed that he could unlock the secrets of alchemy and turn base metals into gold and silver.

This obsession coincided with odd beliefs about religion and the occult which led him to believe that God had been leaving secret messages in ancient religious works and even tried to calculate the date for the end of days. He penned it to be in the year 2060.

3. Francis Crick

Portrait of Francis Crick by Marc Lieberman (CC BY 2.5)

What they’re known for

Francis Crick was a luminary in the field of microbiology and molecular biology. His work with James Watson gave us our understanding of the structure of DNA including the famous double-helix shape. Crick paved the way for much of our modern understanding of DNA, RNA, and other molecular level proteins that make up life.

He was also a noted neuroscientist in his later years.

Crick’s contributions to modern science, especially medicine and molecular biology cannot be understated. His discoveries serve as a bedrock for most people’s basic beliefs about life, DNA, and their interactions. However, his obsession with life led him down some odd roads.

Evidence of madness

Beginning in the 1970s, Francis Crick would get an idea in his head that would permeate the rest of his life and his career. The idea goes by the name of Directed Panspermia. This is the idea that the so-called “building blocks of life” did not occur naturally in Earth’s ancient past but were rather seeded here by intelligent spacefaring aliens.

His study into the complexities of DNA and the origins of life led him to believe that these things were so complex and uncommon that they could have only been created and placed here by extraterrestrials. In the early 1970s, this was proposed simply as an alternative idea to the prevailing theories about how the original DNA strands might have been forged in Earth’s violent geologic past. However, he continued to hold these beliefs for many decades and never came back around to the accepted way of thinking.

It was also discovered in his private letters that Crick was a proponent of eugenics and expressed the belief that the only thing standing between humanity and a full-blown eugenics movement was the existence of religion in society.

He even mentions madness in his autobiographical work What Mad Pursuit and focused much on theoretical neuroscience in his private time.

4. Bobby Fischer

Bobby Fischer playing chess in 1960. (CC BY-SA 3.0)

What they’re known for

Bobby Fischer is noted as being one of the greatest chess players of all time — if not the greatest. During his time as an active player on the international circuit, he defeated nearly every one of his contemporaries, oftentimes handily. He was a key figure during the Cold War and played numerous games in Europe against Soviet and communist players in a perceived battle of wills between East and West.

He is the only chess player to have a perfect win rate in the United States Championship, scoring eleven wins and no draws.

Fischer wrote extensively on the game of chess and is one of the last chess grandmasters to be so well known by the public. He was one of the first people to play chess against a computer and for a long time having a computer beat or outplay Bobby Fischer was a staple in the development of game-playing AI (Artificial Intelligence).

When Fischer won the 1972 World Chess Championship, he became the first American to do so and broke a quarter-century of dominance by Russian speaking chess players. His victory was sensational in the United States and seen as a key moment of the Cold War.

Evidence of madness

After his meteoric rise to fame following the 1972 World Chess Championship, Fischer cracked. Upon returning to the United States following his victory in Europe over some of the greatest chess minds in the world, the country was ready to welcome him as a hero. Bobby Fischer day was declared and he was offered millions of dollars in sponsorship opportunities and appearance fees. He declined them all.

Instead of ushering in a new era of American chess dominance led by Fischer, he disappeared from the public eye.

In 1975 he forfeited his world title when he refused to show up for the match. When asked to attend the event, Fischer wrote back a list of strenuous demands for the match which read as follows:

“The match continues until one player wins 10 games, draws not counting. No limit to the total number of games played. In case of a 9–9 score, the champion (Fischer) retains the title, and the prize fund is split equally.”

When his demands were not met, he refused to show and the title was forfeited.

He wouldn’t play chess again publicly or professionally for two decades. He bounced around from place to place playing chess masters in private. He would never emerge from his self-imposed exile in any meaningful way again.

One of his contemporaries, Reuben Fine, said of Fischer:

“Some of Bobby’s behavior is so strange, unpredictable, odd and bizarre that even his most ardent apologists have had a hard time explaining what makes him tick.”

For the remainder of his life, Bobby Fischer remained a mythical legend in the chess community but an odd pariah for the rest of the world. He was arrested numerous times, made heinous antisemitic comments, and praised the September 11th attacks in an interview conducted in the Philippines.

5. Pythagoras

Illustration of Pythagoras teaching philosophy to women (The Story of the Greatest Nations / Public domain)

What they’re known for

Pythagoras gave us the well-known Pythagorean Theorem which gives us a way to deduce the lengths of the sides of a triangle. This is the most enduring part of Pythagoras’s legacy but he had an extensive body of work in the fields of geometry and astronomy. Pythagoras was one of the first people to ever propose that the Earth was a sphere rather than a flat disk. He also deduced that the Morning Star and the Evening Star were the same celestial object, Venus. These propositions, including his famous theorem, were being made 2500 years ago.

He is one of the most well-read and well studied of the famous Greek philosophers. His influence is still felt today in the modern classroom but his ideas and his figure have been present in the world since his existence.

Evidence of madness

Pythagoras was obsessed with numerology. Aristotle once said of Pythagoras that he only studied mathematics and geometry in the pursuit of mystical goals. Pythagoras believed that everything was made up of numbers, from music to the origins of the universe. His belief in numerology was so strong and so fiery that it spawned an entirely new religion —Pythagoreanism.

He invited his dedicated followers to Croton where they were invited to begin a new phase of life where the study of mathematics and mysticism existed hand in hand. Adherents were encouraged to study numerology but were also given strict guidelines about how they should live. Their lives were carefully regulated and there were rules about what you could wear, what roads you could take, what you should eat, and more. Beans were forbidden. New recruits could not meet Pythagoras until they had been involved in the “school” for at least five years.

Today, Pythagoreanism has all of the telltale signs of a cult. Some compared it to a strange monastery. His contemporaries were derisive of it.

Aristotle wrote in Metaphysics:

“The so-called Pythagoreans, who were the first to take up mathematics, not only advanced this subject, but saturated with it, they fancied that the principles of mathematics were the principles of all things.”

So, while Pythagoras spread knowledge and love of mathematics that exists to this day, he also used his position to found a sort of mystical math cult in ancient Greece.