A beautiful mind can save your life

Terry Tao, the Fields medalist and the prodigy who developed compressed sensing with Emmanuel Candes and David Donoho, has an autistic brother:

The Taos had different challenges in raising their other two sons, although all three excelled in math. Trevor, two years younger than Terry, is autistic with top-level chess skills and the musical savant gift to play back on the piano a musical piece — even one played by an entire orchestra — after hearing it just once. He completed a Ph.D. in mathematics and now works for the Defense Science and Technology Organization in Australia.

The youngest, Nigel, told his father that he was “not another Terry,” and his parents let him learn at a less accelerated pace. Nigel, with degrees in economics, math and computer science, now works as a computer engineer for Google Australia.

This is interesting in many ways. A particular way to look at it, is that Terry has provided a technique (Compressed Sensing) that has the potential to revolutionize the way people model the primary cortex: i.e how the brain decomposes, processes and understands information. A trait of autism is the inability to treat correctly information and subsequently act on it. This type of story where somebody discovers something that eventually he is affected by afterwards, reminds me of a story Glenn Seaborg told us when he came to campus six months before he passed away. During his talk, he reminded us that some colleagues of his came to his lab once and asked if he could find a radioactive element that had a specific half life that was not too long and not too short. Seaborg obliged and discovered Iodine-131. According to this entry on wikipedia:

Livingood and Seaborg collaborated to create an important isotope of iodine, iodine-131 (I-131) which is still used to treat thyroid disease. (Many years later, it was credited with prolonging the life of Seaborg's mother.)