Search This Blog

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

A Fascinating Mad Man

As you know most of my blogs start with my childhood memories, yet another thought with childhood memory of a man by whom i was inspired the most, was considered as mad by the society. I would like to define the "mad" according to dictionary:- Mentally disturbed or insane. Mad man means sometimes above mentioned disturbance are visible in a personality in the form of over excitement, anger, extremely emotional or thoughtful.

Most of the time when i used to hang out with my dad or friends in the town, i spotted that man, talking to himself wearing a old pajama with white cotton shirt(was no more white) moving his hand in the air looks like that he was solving a mathematical equation. I never dared to get close to him because the society(means the people around me those who think that they are normal and in equilibrium compared to that man) gave me a feeling of fear that going close to him would be harmful as a result of physical damage. But no body could speculate that the curiosity about that man in my mind was causing lot of mental damage. One fine day we three of us myself,
Nikhil and Afzal saw him seating on wooden chair at one tapri( a kind of small tea shop with some snacks), that mad man was using some Greek symbols and some real numbers on piece of news paper(white area of news paper), we three were sixth standard school boy so we were exposed to such type of objects(Greek symbols and numbers) and we could think that he is dealing(playing) with mathematics. At that time we were not able to understand what exactly what a mad man used be and though we observed some abnormality but that was not sufficient to get scared off him. Nikhil was pretty fearless guy and ignoring all such warning of so called society he just approached that man and ask him "what are you doing and to whom you used talk." He turned to us with a kind of weird smile and showed that piece of paper to us that paper was in front of us in such way that it was obstructing his face(little imagination is required with the help of 9th std physics means optics). That paper was with system of linear equations and polynomials. We were not capable enough to understand his mathematical derivations but yes we got a clue that this guy is not dangerous where as he may help us in our assignments. Later we investigate about him that he was very bright mathematics student in the university and later he gone insane(according to definition of mad man in the society).

My parents were getting stressed day by day, observing increased proximity of me and my friends with that man. As we know normally a young kid always fascinated by sportsman or
bollywood celebrities but in my life I was fascinated by that mad man who used talk himself and I considered him a fabulous mathematician. I always wanted to be like him who used to talk to himself. It has been almost twenty years and today I found that I started talking to myself and trying to model some of the complex phenomenon of this cosmos with the help of mathematics.


I think that the euclidean distance of normal behaved human and madmen is quite high compare to all the distances among all normal humans. Where as every one is mad with respect to other but because the euclidean distance is not quite high among their behavior which keeps that human under the normal human category . To represent those mad men with help of little maths. If I consider that whole population of human and there behavior is normally distributed than madmen lie on the tail of normal curve means beyond the +3 and -3 sigma. And if i plot human behavior of whole population in a scatter plot than these madmen will be like outliers but these outliers are useful like in my case who helped me to understand the mathematics and becomes my inspiration.
-------------
P.S. - I received couple of feedback that axes are not defined. Y-axis represents the behavior of an human and X-axis is symbolic representation of humans (like physical, social and economical status). Actually as we see that in scatter plot the points which are closed to each other nothing but there euclidean distance from each other is very less except one point(sample of mad men from population). So we assume that these all points are under the normal distributed curve between -3 to +3 sigma, further more specifically further both, curve and plot are just symbolic(intuitive) representation rather a quantitative analysis.