Working behind the counter at a futon store in Tacoma, Wash., is not the place you would expect to find a man some call a mathematical genius of unprecedented proportions.
Jason
Padgett, 41, sees complex mathematical formulas everywhere he looks and turns
them into stunning, intricate diagrams he can draw by hand. He’s the only
person in the world known to have this incredible skill, which he obtained by
sheer accident just a decade ago.
“I’m
obsessed with numbers, geometry specifically,” Padgett said. “I literally dream
about it.
There’s not a moment that I can’t see it, and it just doesn’t turn off.”
Padgett doesn’t have a PhD, a college degree or even a background in math. His talent was born out of a true medical mystery that scientists around the world are still trying to unravel.
There’s not a moment that I can’t see it, and it just doesn’t turn off.”
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| Credit: Courtesy Jason Padgett |
Padgett doesn’t have a PhD, a college degree or even a background in math. His talent was born out of a true medical mystery that scientists around the world are still trying to unravel.
Ten years
ago, Padgett was only interested in two things: working out and partying. One
night he was walking out of a karaoke club in Tacoma when he was brutally
attacked by muggers who beat and kicked him in the head repeatedly. Padgett
said they were after his $99 leather jacket.
“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 gonna get killed,’” he said.
At the
time, doctors said he had a concussion, but within a day or two, Padgett began
to notice something remarkable. This college dropout who couldn’t draw became
obsessed with drawing intricate diagrams, but didn’t know what they were.
“I see bits
and pieces of the Pythagorean theorem everywhere,” he said. “Every single
little curve, every single spiral, every tree is part of that equation.”
The diagrams
he draws are called fractals and Padgett can draw a visual representation of
the formula Pi, that infinite number that begins with 3.14.
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| Jason Padgett's drawing of Pi. Credit: Courtesy Jason Padgett |
“A fractal
is a shape that when you take the shape a part into pieces, the pieces are the
same or similar to the whole. So say I had 1,000 pictures of you, that were
little and I put all those little pictures of you in the right spot to make the
exact same picture of you, but bigger,” he explained.
Much like
the mathematician John Nash, played by Russell Crowe in the 2001 film, “A
Beautiful Mind,” researchers believe Padgett has a remarkable gift. To better
understand how his brain works, Berit Brogaard, a neuroscientist and philosophy
professor at the Center for Neurodynamics at the University of Missouri-St.
Louis, and her team flew Padgett to Finland to run a series of tests.
A scan of
Padgett’s brain showed damage that was forcing his brain to overcompensate in
certain areas that most people don’t have access to, Brogaard explained. The
result was Padgett was now an acquired savant, meaning brilliant in a specific
area.
“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,” Brogaard said.
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| Credit: Courtesy Jason Padgett |
Padgett
said his goal now is to get out of the furniture store and into the classroom
to hopefully teach others that math is as beautiful and natural as the world around
us. When asked if he thought his talent was a burden or a gift, Padgett said it
was a mixture of both.
“Sometimes
I would really like to turn it off, and it won’t,” he said. “But the good far
outweigh the bad. I would not give it up for anything.”
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Credit: Courtesy Jason Padgett
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