Now, this isn’t the story of a man who was a serial mugger that left his horrible ways behind to delve into the wild world of math. This is the story of a nice young man who couldn’t have cared less about solving equations, and was way more interested in working out, that is, until he was mugged for his fancy leather jacket and left with a concussion that changed his life, and brain, forever.
Yahoo News writes:
Jason Padgett doesn’t have a PhD, or a Masters degree. In fact, he dropped out of college and works at a futon store, but he is a mathematical genius and has been since being brutally attacked and kicked in the head by muggers a decade ago.
The 41-year-old from Tacoma, Washington used to mostly be interested in working out and partying when muggers beat him outside a karaoke club for his $99 leather jacket. Now he sees complex formulas everywhere and turns them into diagrams.
“All I saw was a bright flash of light and the next thing I knew I was on my knees on the ground and I thought, ‘I’m going to get killed,” he told ABC.
Doctors initially thought it was a concussion, but then Padgett started becoming obsessed with drawing intricate diagrams. He couldn’t draw before and at first had no idea what the diagrams were of.
The diagrams turned out to be fractals, small portions of a visual representation for Pi that are similar to the whole image. Everywhere he looks, he sees formulas such as the Pythagorean Theorem.
Because of the damage, his brain is forced to overcompensate in areas most people can’t access.
“Savant syndrome is the development of a particular skill, that can be mathematical, spatial, or autistic, that develop to an extreme degree that sort of makes a person super human,” said Berit Brogaard, a neuroscientist and philosophy professor at the Center of Neurodynamics at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, to ABC.
Read more at news.yahoo.com