Wanna learn maths ? Go clubbing !

This procedure is not recommended.


“I was very shallow,” he laughs. “Life rotated around girls, partying, drinking, waking up with a hangover and then going out and chasing girls and going out to bars again." Maths wasn’t on his radar whatsoever.

But on the night of Friday 13 September 2002 everything changed. While out with friends, Padgett was attacked and robbed by two men outside a karaoke bar. They took his already torn leather jacket. Padgett staggered to a hospital across the street where he was told he had concussion and a bleeding kidney thanks to a punch to the gut. “They gave me a shot of pain medication and sent me home,” he remembers.

But while Padgett was experiencing all these negative consequences [extreme OCD] from his attack, something incredible was happening too. The way Jason was seeing things, changed. Everything that was curved looked like it was slightly pixelated,” he explains. “Water coming down the drain didn’t look like it was a smooth, flowing thing anymore, it looked like these little tangent lines.”

While in the MRI scanner, hundreds of equations, including fake ones, flashed on a screen in front of Padgett’s eyes. The researchers then watched which parts of his brain lit up in response.

“They found that I had access to parts of the brain that we don’t have conscious access to and also the visual cortex was working in conjunction with the part of the brain that does mathematics, which obviously makes sense,” says Padgett.

...Brogaard believes the brain injury Padgett sustained caused him to develop a form of synaesthesia where certain things triggered visions of mathematical formulas or geometric shapes, either in his mind or projected in front of him. She also hypothesised that synaesthesia made Padgett an acquired savant.

I find it fascinating that synaesthesia can make you better at maths. Does it actually change the computations the brain is doing, or only make you more aware of them ? Or just lead to a drive to understand what's happening by changing perception, hence the great deal of time he spent learning mathematics online and in college courses ? Anyway, this all ends happily :

Since his diagnosis, Padgett has published a book about his experience called Struck by Genius, he’s toured the world telling people his story and educating them about maths. He started a company called Outliers which helps produce movies about people who have had unique or rare/interesting life stories. He even sells his drawings of fractals.

The two men who attacked him that fateful September night were never convicted despite Padgett identifying them and pressing charges. Years later, however, one of the men, Brady Simmons, wrote to Padgett to apologise while he was undergoing treatment for prescription drug addiction following a suicide attempt. In a sense, two lives were changed in the years that followed the attack. “I’m a completely different person,” says Simmons. “When I look back the abysmal person that I was in the past, I just don’t see how I existed on that level.”

So essentially : bit of a lad gets beaten up by douchebags, becomes mathematical whizz, turns life around; douchebag repents their earlier ways, doesn't become mathematical whizz but does turn life around. The universe indeed works in mysterious ways.

The violent attack that turned a man into a maths genius

Jason Padgett sees maths everywhere. Even something as ordinary as brushing his teeth is governed by mathematics - he turns the tap on and dips his toothbrush into the water 16 times. "I don't know why I like perfect squares," he says.