Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease, when the mind is obsessed with it.

This fascination with computer models is something I understand very well. Richard Feynmann called it a disease. I fear he is right.

At De Pauw I contracted a disease which I have never shaken off. The disease was idealism. Because of it I did the thing in life I wanted to do — Writing.

To put it in a nutshell, he was afflicted with a love of literature. It was the fatal nature of this disease to substitute a phantom for reality.

This disease of curiosity.

I would not dare to say that there is a direct relation between mathematics and madness, but there is no doubt that great mathematicians suffer from maniacal characteristics, delirium and symptoms of schizophrenia.

It was not so much that I was doing mathematics, but rather that mathematics had taken possession of me.

But my behavior was really the result of the illness, which had progressed far enough to produce some of its most famous and sinister hallmarks: confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of memory.

The philosopher treats a question; like an illness.

I contracted a disease which I have never shaken off. The disease was idealism. Because of it, I did the thing in life I wanted to do - Writing.

I have always noticed that any kind of pressure narrows my awareness and stunts my curiosity, because once I apply my nose to the grindstone I find it difficult to stick it up in the air again to smell the flowers. Of course a degree of obsession often produces the best work; but it does not produce the best life.

Well, Mr. Frankel, who started this program, began to suffer from the computer disease that anybody who works with computers now knows about. It's a very serious disease and it interferes completely with the work. The trouble with computers is you *play* with them. They are so wonderful. You have these switches - if it's an even number you do this, if it's an odd number you do that - and pretty soon you can do more and more elaborate things if you are clever enough, on one machine.

After a while the whole system broke down. Frankel wasn't paying any attention; he wasn't supervising anybody. The system was going very, very slowly - while he was sitting in a room figuring out how to make one tabulator automatically print arc-tangent X, and then it would start and it would print columns and then bitsi, bitsi, bitsi, and calculate the arc-tangent automatically by integrating as it went along and make a whole table in one operation.

Absolutely useless. We *had* tables of arc-tangents. But if you've ever worked with computers, you understand the disease - the *delight* in being able to see how much you can do. But he got the disease for the first time, the poor fellow who invented the thing.

There is one [disease] which is widespread, and from which men rarely escape. This disease varies in degree in different men … I refer to this: that every person thinks his mind … more clever and more learned than it is … I have found that this disease has attacked many an intelligent person … They … express themselves [not only] upon the science with which they are familiar, but upon other sciences about which they know nothing … If met with applause … so does the disease itself become aggravated.

Henri Poincaré thought the theory of infinite sets a grave malady and pathologic. "Later generations," he said in 1908, "will regard set theory as a disease from which one has recovered.