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December 2, 2025

Lead poisoning may have led to a generation of serial killers

The Pacific Northwest is known for five things: lumber, aircraft, tech, coffee, and crime. What might account for the abrupt rise and equally abrupt fall, between the nineteen-sixties and the turn of the century, of the “golden age” of serial killing? And why were so many of these brutes cradled in a crescent of psychopathy around Seattle’s Puget Sound? Fraser thinks the master key is to be found in the fact that the area south and southwest of Seattle was home to massive ore-processing facilities, and her subjects were reared in their murky shadows. “Spare some string for the smelters and smoke plumes,” she writes of her crazy wall, “those insidious killers, shades of Hades.” The smelters caused a profusion of heavy metals in the air and water, and toxins such as lead and arsenic were found in staggering concentrations in the blood of Tacoma’s children. Some were merely dulled, or delinquent; a few became tabloid monsters. (via the New Yorker)

Spotify changed its randomness algorithm to make it less random but it feels more random

Spotify’s first iteration of its shuffle feature was dictated by a decades-old algorithm that generated unbiased randomness from a finite sequence of elements. Breathtakingly efficient, the Fisher-Yates shuffle was employed by Spotify to dismantle user playlists and reassemble them into new, unpredictable orders. From the developers’ perspective, the task of creating this feature was masterfully accomplished with just a few lines of code. From early users’ perspective, shuffle was a travesty. This discrepancy was bewildering for both parties, but mainly for developers, who had delivered a mathematically perfect version of randomness. Perfection turned out to be the problem. The algorithm captured a Platonic ideal of randomness instead of one compatible with the human mind. We presume that randomness must always be chaotic. However, as randomness is unpredictable, it will at times give the impression of order. (via the FT)

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December 1, 2025

He thought he found gold but it was a 5 billion-year-old meteor

In 2015, David Hole was prospecting in Maryborough Regional Park near Melbourne, Australia. Armed with a metal detector, he discovered something out of the ordinary – a very heavy, reddish rock resting in some yellow clay. He took it home and tried everything to open it, sure that there was a gold nugget inside the rock – after all, Maryborough is in the Goldfields region, where the Australian gold rush peaked in the 19th century. Hole tried a rock saw, an angle grinder, a drill, and even doused the thing in acid. Unable to open the rock, Hole took the nugget to the Melbourne Museum for identification. A scientist there said that after 37 years of working at the museum and examining thousands of rocks, only two of the offerings had ever turned out to be real meteorites, and Hole’s rock was one of those two. He published a scientific paper describing the 4.6 billion-year-old meteorite, which he called Maryborough. (via ScienceAlert)

In the 16th century cadavers were embalmed with honey and then turned into medicine

A mellified man, also known as a human mummy confection, was a legendary medicinal substance created by steeping a human cadaver in honey. The concoction is detailed in Chinese medical sources of the 16th century, which reports that some elderly men in Arabia, nearing the end of their lives, would submit themselves to a process of mummification in honey to create a healing confection. The mellification process would ideally start before death. The donor would stop eating any food other than honey, going as far as to bathe in the substance. Shortly, the donor’s feces and even sweat would consist of honey. When this diet finally proved fatal, the donor’s body would be placed in a stone coffin filled with honey. After a century or so, the contents would have turned into a sort of confection reputedly capable of healing broken limbs, which would then be sold in street markets at a hefty price. (via Wikipedia)

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November 27, 2025

It’s illegal to make fried rice on this one specific day in China

If you share a recipe for or photo of fried rice in China on November 25th, you may get a visit from the authorities. To understand why, you have to go back 75 years. North Korea, backed by the Soviet Union and China, launched a surprise invasion into South Korea, hoping to unify the Korean peninsula. More than three years and as many as three million lives later, the two sides signed an armistice. One of the lives lost was Mao Anying, the oldest son of the chairman of China’s Communist Party, Mao Zedong. His death has become a major moment in the narrative shared by Chinese dissidents today, who celebrate November 25 as China’s Thanksgiving Day. But because of censorship, those who want to mark the day do so by sharing a fried rice recipe or pictures of the dish. It’s a reference to the mythic story behind Anying’s demise, which says he was trying to cook fried rice, and the smoke from the fire exposed his position. (via Now I Know)

He popularized a famous Italian coffee pot and when he died he was buried in one

Renato Bialetti, the Italian businessman who turned an aluminum coffee pot into a classic global design, died last week at the age of 93. In accordance with his and his family’s wishes, his ashes were interred in an urn shaped like a large version of a Moka pot, the stovetop coffee maker he introduced to the world. Bialetti didn’t invent the Moka. He just made it famous. A man named Luigi di Ponti designed the appliance in 1933 and sold the patent to Renato’s father Alfonso Bialetti, an aluminum vendor. Sales lagged under the elder Bialetti, but Renato had bigger, coffee-scented dreams when he took over the business in the 1940s. He spearheaded a massive marketing campaign across Italy for the pots, which were branded with a charmingly mustachioed caricature—based either on himself or his father, depending on the legend you read. (via Quartz)

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November 27, 2025

What did Mark Zuckerberg know and when did he know it?

My last Torment Nexus piece was about how weak the FTC’s antitrust case against Meta was, weak enough that it was thrown out by a federal court judge. But don’t take that argument as evidence that I am a Meta fan — far from it. It may not be a monopoly, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t harmful and in some cases actually dangerous. The one I have the most experience with is the situation in Myanmar, where Facebook ignored the signs that its platform was being used to promote violence against the Rohingya population in that country, and ignored them for so long that a United Nations panel came to the conclusion that the company enabled a genocide that killed thousands and left thousands more maimed and homeless. Did Facebook deliberately do this? Of course not. They’re not monsters (or at least not that specific kind of monster). Instead, they simply overlooked the evidence in front of them, or more likely decided it wasn’t important enough to get in the way of the platform’s growth and engagement goals.

Whenever something like this happens — not just with Facebook, but plenty of other tech companies — the response has become a kind of ritualized theater performance, a stylized exercise of going through the motions without any real outcome or change. In Meta’s case, it involves Mark Zuckerberg or some other functionary from Facebook or Instagram commenting in the press about something hateful or dangerous that its platform enabled, and then in some cases appearing before Congress, shamefaced and sometimes truculent about the said wrongdoing. Zuckerberg or his stand-in will say that they are sorry, and that they had no idea that (insert hateful or dangerous conduct here) was being enabled by the platform. At some point, months or even years later, it will be revealed that Facebook or Instagram knew exactly what was happening and chose not to do anything about it, or at least nothing substantive anyway.

One of the examples of this that I am the most familiar with was when former Facebook staffer Frances Haugen blew the whistle on the company’s behavior involving young and mostly female users of Instagram, in 2021. According to the thousands of pages of internal documents that Haugen took with her when she left the company — which were shared with the Wall Street Journal and other outlets, as well as with members of Congress — Meta senior executives knew from their internal research that Instagram was increasingly linked to emotional distress and body-image issues among young women. As Haugen described in an interview with me at the Mesh conference in 2023, she and a number of other staffers worked on ways of trying to reduce or even eliminate this problem, but time and again their work was ignored — because doing so might decrease engagement or interfere with Meta’s growth and revenue targets. So did Meta know? Yes. Did they care? No. Or, at least not enough to do anything about it.

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November 26, 2025

President Calvin Coolidge had a pet racoon in the White House

After the 1913 death of Horace Vose, the traditional provider of the White House Thanksgiving turkey, numerous farmers sent animals to the president for Thanksgiving dinner. In 1926, a Mississippi supporter sent a racoon. Coolidge, who had never eaten raccoon and had no appetite to try it, kept the racoon as a pet and named it Rebecca. For Christmas, an embroidered collar was made for Rebecca, inscribed “White House Raccoon”. She enjoyed participating in the annual White House Easter egg roll. She was fed shrimp and persimmons, and eggs were a favorite. Rebecca was let loose in the White House and walked on a leash outdoors. At times, she could be mischievous and was known to unscrew lightbulbs, open cabinets, and unpot houseplants. She was known to nestle in Coolidge’s lap when he sat by the fireplace. (via Wikipedia)

The story behind Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin has a bunch of holes in it

Many know the story of Alexander Fleming’s chance discovery of penicillin. Fleming left culture plates streaked with Staphylococcus on his lab bench while he went away. When he returned, he found that “a mould” had contaminated one of his plates, having floated in from an open window. He noticed that, within a “ring of death” around the mold, the bacteria had disappeared. Fleming immediately began investigating this strange new substance. He identified the mold as Penicillium rubrum and named the substance penicillin. A decade later, pharmacologist Howard Florey and biochemist Ernst Chain at Oxford would pick up where Fleming left off, developing penicillin into a life-saving drug and usher in the era of antibiotics. This is the kind of science story everyone likes. One of serendipity and accidental discovery; a chance observation that changed the world. But is it true? For decades, scientists and historians have puzzled over inconsistencies in Fleming’s story. (via Asimov Press)

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November 25, 2025

You can rent a hotel room that looks like Goodnight Moon

If you were one of the millions of children who grew up reading Goodnight Moon before bed, chances are its iconic green bedroom is permanently seared into your memory. Now, for the next four months, you have the opportunity to sleep in the Goodnight Moon room IRL. The Goodnight Moon room has been faithfully re-created—down to the red balloon, bowl of mush, and cow jumping over the moon—for a new immersive suite at the Sheraton Boston Hotel. The room can accommodate up to two adults and two children, and a booking in the suite comes with perks like four tickets to the View Boston observation deck, a $150 daily food and beverage credit, complimentary moon and star cookies, and even the supplies to make your own bowl of mush. It’s available to book now through February 28, 2026, starting at $399 per night. (via Fast Company)

Study finds that people behave better if there’s someone nearby dressed as Batman

After making a guy dressed as Batman stand around in a subway car, a team of researchers found that the behavior of people around him suddenly improved the moment he showed up. No longer was everyone completely self-involved; with the presence of a superhero, commuters started helping each other more than they would’ve without him around. The findings of the unorthodox study, published in the journal npj Mental Health Research, demonstrate the power of introducing something offbeat into social situations to jolt people out of the mental autopilot they slip into to navigate the drudgery of everyday life. In a series of experiments, the researchers had a woman who visibly appeared pregnant enter a busy train, and observed how often people offered to give up their seats. They then repeated this scenario with a crucial change: when the pregnant woman entered the train from one door, a man dressed as Batman entered from another. (via Futurism)

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November 21, 2025

A Russian woman on the run and a poisoned cheesecake

Olga Tsvyk got a job doing eyelash extensions, a skill she had picked up back home in Ukraine. In March 2016, a 40-something recent Russian immigrant named Viktoria Nasyrova walked into her salon. Nasyrova told Tsvyk that she was a masseuse and that she lived with her boyfriend in Brooklyn. She was open and friendly, and they talked easily when she came in for appointments every few weeks. They shared cultural references, enjoyed tastes of home, like beef rib dumplings and sour cherry jam, and had both endured the same journey to the U.S. — wrestling with legal issues and piles of paperwork. They also looked remarkably like each other. But Nasyrova wasn’t who she said she was. She had been on the run in Russia for at least a year, and her U.S. visa was set to expire. Nasyrova decided to kill her doppelgänger and steal her life — or at least her immigration status. Her weapon of choice: a slice of cheesecake. (via Elle)

She discovered the first living example of a prehistoric Coelacanth in the 1930s

In 1938, Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer, a museum curator in South Africa was paying a visit to the docks as part of her regular duties. One of her jobs was to inspect any catches thought by local fishermen to be out of the ordinary. Later, Courtenay-Latimer recalled: “I picked away at a layer of slime to reveal the most beautiful fish I had ever seen. It was pale mauvy blue, with faint flecks of whitish spots; it had an iridescent silver-blue-green sheen all over. It was covered in hard scales, and it had four limb-like fins and a strange puppy-dog tail.” Courtenay-Latimer didn’t know what the fish was but she was determined to find out. She convinced a taxi driver to put the 127-pound dead fish in the back of his cab and take them back to the museum. She attempted to preserve the fish so it could be examined by an icythologist–first by taking it to the local hospital morgue and then by having it taxidermied. (via The Smithsonian)

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November 20, 2025

The Meta antitrust case started out weak and got worse

The Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against Meta was dismissed in its entirety on February 18th by Judge James Boasberg of the District Court for the District of Columbia. Just to recap for those who haven’t been following every bump and hurdle of this five-year case, the FTC first charged Meta with having an illegal monopoly and maintaining that monopoly via anti-competitive behavior in December of 2020 (I wrote about the lawsuit for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I was the chief digital writer at the time). The case was rejected the following year by the very same Judge Boasberg because he said the FTC had failed to prove that Meta had a monopoly over a distinct market (I wrote about that for CJR too). However, the judge gave the FTC a chance to re-file the case provided it came up with more evidence of a monopoly, so it tried to do so – and on Tuesday, the judge threw that case out just like he did the previous one, saying the evidence provided failed to prove the FTC’s case. From Politico:

Meta’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp did not create an illegal social media monopoly, a federal judge ruled Tuesday, a decision that solidifies the future of the $1.5 trillion tech giant. Judge James Boasberg in Washington rejected the Federal Trade Commission’s claim that Facebook’s parent company monopolized the “personal social networking” market for connecting with friends and family. “As it has forecast in prior Opinions over the years, the FTC has an uphill battle to establish the contours of any separate PSN market and Defendant’s monopoly therein,” Boasberg wrote. “The Court ultimately concludes that the agency has not carried its burden: Meta holds no monopoly in the relevant market.”

One of the key points in the FTC case – which was originally joined by a similar lawsuit filed on behalf of 46 states, although the latter was also thrown out by Boasberg in 2021 – was that because of its allegedly monopolistic position in the personal social-networking market, the company should not have been allowed to acquire either Instagram (which it bought in 2012 for $1 billion) or WhatsApp, which it acquired in 2014 for $22 billion. According to the FTC, Instagram cemented Meta’s dominance over photo-related social networking, and WhatsApp entrenched its position in person-to-person text messaging – especially in non-US countries, since WhatsApp is free and when it was acquired many countries charged users for sending text messages. Meta, not surprisingly, pointed out that both acquisitions were approved by the Federal Trade Commission at the time they were done, but the FTC was unmoved. Here’s how the New York Times summarized the case when it was first launched in 2020:

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November 19, 2025

They invited a homeless man to dinner and he stayed for 45 years

Rob Parsons and his wife Diane were listening to the radio and getting ready for Christmas on 23 December 1975 when they heard a knock at the door of their Cardiff home. The couple contemplated ignoring it – they’d already overcompensated the small carol singer murdering Once in Royal David’s City – but Rob, now 77, switched off the radio and went to the door. On the step was a man with several day’s stubble, dirty creased clothes and messy brown hair. “Don’t you know who I am?” he asked. “I’m Ronnie Lockwood,” the man said, as he handed over black bin bag with all his possessions and a frozen chicken into Rob’s hands. Rob asked what the frozen chicken was for. “He said somebody had given it to him for Christmas, but he can’t cook. So I brought him inside and Diane made him a roast,” Rob remembers. They let him stay in the spare room for a couple of months while Ronnie got himself established as a dustman. However, those months turned into years, which turned into decades. (via Metro UK)

The Unabomber’s brother identified him after he re-worded this common phrase in his manifesto

The common phrase “You can’t have your cake and eat it too” seems a little off to some people. You can obviously have your cake and then you can eat it. Wikipedia’s editors note that “some find the common form of the proverb to be incorrect or illogical and instead prefer: ‘You can’t eat your cake and then have it too.’ This used to be the most common form of the expression until the 1930s–1940s. In 1995, the Unabomber wrote a 35,000 word manifesto and sent it to the Washington Post, New York Times, and others. At the time, the mystery around the identity of the bomber intrigued many, including a man named David Kaczynski. David’s wife had urged him to read the full thing, as some themes reminded her of the rants of David’s reclusive brother, Ted Kaczynski. And David immediately saw some phrases that reminded him of Ted. One passage that jumped off the page: “As for the negative consequences of eliminating industrial society—well, you can’t eat your cake and have it too. (via Now I Know)

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November 18, 2025

Russian missiles are too fast so Ukraine jams them with music

The Kinzhal is one of Russia’s most fearsome missiles. Streaking at Mach 5.7 as high as 15.5 miles in the air, the 4.7-ton missile can deliver a 1,000-pound warhead over a distance of 300 miles. It’s so fast that Ukraine’s best kinetic air defenses, its U.S.-made Patriot missiles, often struggle to hit incoming Kinzhals. Good news for Ukraine. One of the country’s most popular strategic electronic warfare systems, Lima EW, now works against the Kinzhal, according to the system’s user. Not only are the operators from the Night Watch unit using Lima EW to take down Kinzhals — around a dozen in just the last two weeks — they’re doing it in style: by replacing the incoming missiles’ satellite navigation signals with a popular patriotic Ukrainian anthem, “Our Father Is Bandera.” Bandera was a popular Ukrainian insurgent during World War II. (via Trench Art)

Researchers have found evidence that the ancient Egyptians dabbled in opiates

A detailed chemical analysis of residues found in an alabaster vase dedicated to King Xerxes, who ruled an ancient empire in what is now Iran from 486 to 465 B.C., identified traces of the narcotic substance. The results provide the most conclusive evidence yet that opiates were a major part of daily life in ancient Egyptian society, say the researchers, who work in the Yale Ancient Pharmacology Program. They published their findings in the Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology.“When a rare, expertly crafted alabastron bearing a king’s name yields the same opium signature found in more humble tomb assemblages from hundreds of years earlier, we can’t dismiss the results as accidental contamination or the experimentation of the socially elite,” wrote Yale researcher Christopher Renton, one of the study authors, in an email. (via Nautilus)

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November 17, 2025

He created a Dr. Frankenstein 30 years before Mary Shelley

Long before Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was published in 1818, an author penned a story that resembles it on more than one account: François‐Félix Nogaret, Le Miroir des événemens actuals, ou la belle au plus offrant (The Looking Glass of Actuality, or Beauty to the Highest Bidder, 1790). Nogaret’s story about an inventor named Frankenstein who builds an artificial man is an astounding precursor, especially since the Revolution and its attempt to make a “new man” have long focused interpretations of Shelley’s work. Both texts ask whether technological innovation will help or hinder human progress, and provide answers reflecting their differing historical and ideological contexts. What seemed possible in 1790 was later viewed with skepticism, including by Nogaret himself in subsequent editions of Le Miroir (1795, 1800). The tension between enthusiasm and disdain for the project of improving upon nature or remaking mankind, prefigured in the changes between the two editions of Nogaret’s novella, resonates profoundly in Frankenstein. (via Taylor & Francis)

A British man looking for a lost hammer found a hoard of Roman coins worth $6 million

The Hoxne Hoard is the largest hoard of late Roman silver and gold discovered in Britain, and the largest collection of gold and silver coins of the fourth and fifth centuries found anywhere within the former Roman Empire. It was found by Eric Lawes, a metal detectorist in the village of Hoxne in Suffolk, England in 1992. The hoard was buried in an oak box or small chest filled with items in precious metal, sorted mostly by type, with some in smaller wooden boxes and others in bags or wrapped in fabric. Remnants of the chest and fittings, such as hinges and locks, were recovered in the excavation. The coins of the hoard date it after AD 407. Tenant farmer Peter Whatling had lost a hammer and asked his friend Eric Lawes, a retired gardener and amateur metal detectorist, to help look for it. The hammer was later donated to the British Museum. (via Wikipedia)

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November 14, 2025

He changed life in the Gulf by inventing a camel-racing robot

Before he found himself on the Al-Shahaniya racetrack on the outskirts of Doha, Esan Maruff had never seen a camel race. It was May 2005, and Maruff’s robotics team was on-site for a Qatar-funded research project — to make human jockeys obsolete by building a camel-racing robot. Looking back, he still seems shocked that his new job at a robotics lab dropped him into the middle of one of the region’s most persistent human rights violations: child trafficking. Children have been groomed to ride camels in the Gulf States since the 1970s, in an endless pursuit for lighter-weight jockeys and faster race times. As camel racing evolved into a professional sport in the 1980s and ’90s, the demand for new jockeys bred a network of traffickers who bought young boys from debt-ridden families in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sudan to sell in the Gulf. Racing injuries, physical abuse, inhumane living conditions, and deaths were all documented by human rights organizations in jockey camps. (via Rest of World)

She started out researching Shakespeare and helped invent modern cryptography

Elizebeth Friedman graduated from Hillsdale College in Michigan with a major in English literature. In 1916, while working at the Newberry Research Library in Chicago, she was recruited by George Fabyan to work on his 500-acre estate at Riverbank, his private “think tank.” Fabyan, a wealthy textile merchant, told Friedman she would assist in the attempt to prove that Sir Francis Bacon had authored Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets using a cipher contained within. Up until the creation of the Army’s Cipher Bureau, Riverbank was the only facility capable of exploiting and solving enciphered messages. Her career embraces cryptology against international smuggling and drug running in various parts of the world and she later became a consultant to and created communications security systems for the International Monetary Fund. (via the NSA)

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November 13, 2025November 13, 2025

During World War I the UK banned landscape painting

With the outbreak of the First World War, the British people grew paranoid that undercover German agents were infiltrating the nation, and the notion that artists might be spies drew some of its credence from none other than Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the scouting movement. Baden-Powell revealed how he and other British spies on the continent had posed as artists and disguised their plans of forts, harbours and industrial areas as innocent sketches of stained glass windows or ivy leaves. With the declaration of war in August 1914, the Defence of the Realm Act made it illegal to make “any photograph, sketch, plan, model, or other representation of any naval or military work, or of any dock or harbour, or with the intent to assist the enemy, of any other place or thing.” The society painter and Royal Academician John Lavery was arrested for painting the Fleet at the Forth Bridge. (via Cambridge University)

He solved a famous math problem, turned down a $1 million prize and then disappeared

On a cold day in November, a man living quietly in Russia posted a paper to a public server that was the foundation for one of the most important math proofs in over a century. The paper was the first of three published over the next year solving the long-standing Poincaré conjecture, a hypothesis posed nearly a century earlier by Henri Poincaré. In 2006, mathematicians John Morgan and Gang Tian published a 473-page paper showing that Perelman’s work did in fact prove the elusive conjecture. Perelman was offered the prestigious Fields Medal and the Clay Millennium math prize, which came with a $1-million award. He turned them down, resigned from his position at the Steklov Institute in 2005 and has since ferociously avoided the limelight. It’s unclear whether he is still working on math in his St. Petersburg apartment, where as of the early 2010s, his neighbors said he was caring for his elderly mother. (via LiveScience)

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November 13, 2025November 13, 2025

The Internet Archive should be protected not attacked

In a recent edition of The Torment Nexus, I wrote about Wikipedia, which I argued was one of the best things the internet ever created (or that we all created with the help of the internet). In my opinion, there is another thing that ranks right up there with Wikipedia on the list of great things, and that is the Internet Archive. Just as Jimmy Wales created Wikipedia as a crowdsourced repository of information, Brewster Kahle created the Internet Archive as a repository for as much of the internet as he could save. Want to find the original Google.com page from 1998? Or a version of the Apple website from 1996? Or the original version of Wikipedia from 2001? The archive’s Wayback Machine can find it. And much like Wikipedia – which has come under fire from Elon Musk’s competing Grokipedia and others who dislike the truth and want to replace it with their preferred version – the Internet Archive has been and continues to be under attack on a variety of fronts, mostly from commercial interests who dislike free information.

There’s a conventional wisdom that “the internet never forgets,” and therefore anything that has been posted will survive forever, but the internet and the web forget things all the time. This was one of the reasons why Kahle and others decided to create the Internet Archive in 1996 – because of what became known as “link rot,” where websites disappear for one reason or another, and then everyone who linked to them is left with a dead link where that information used to be. I’ve had to deal with this on a more personal level multiple times, when companies I worked for removed their archives and articles I worked on disappeared instantly – which is why I use a service called Authory, so I have a personal archive of everything I’ve published. Here’s how Kahle described the rationale behind the Archive in a piece for Scientific American in 1997:

The early manuscripts at the Library of Alexandria were burned, much of early printing was not saved, and many early films were recycled for their silver content. While the Internet’s World Wide Web is unprecedented in spreading the popular voice of millions that would never have been published before, no one recorded these documents and images from 1 year ago. The history of early materials of each medium is one of loss and eventual partial reconstruction through fragments. Even though the documents on the Internet are the easy documents to collect and archive, the average lifetime of a document is 75 days and then it is gone. While the changing nature of the Internet brings a freshness and vitality, it also creates problems for historians and users alike.

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November 13, 2025

During World War I the UK banned landscape painting

He solved a famous math problem, turned down a $1 million prize and then disappeared

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