College Dropout becomes a math genius after mugging

When Jason Padgett was attacked by muggers outside a karaoke club in Tacoma, Wash., a decade ago, he thought he was going to die.

The attackers, who he said were after his leather jacket, kicked him in the head repeatedly. Miraculously, he not only survived the attack, but developed a mysterious mathematical gift as a result of it.

The 41-year-old does not see the world in the same way that most people do.

“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.

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Jason D. Padgett is from Anchorage Alaska, currently living in Tacoma Washinton. The beauty of numbers and their connection to the pure geometry of space time and the universe is shown in his fractal diagrams. Fractals are shapes that when decomposed into pieces, the pieces are the same or similar to the whole. His is currently studying how all fractals arise from limits and how E=MC2 is itself a fractal. When he first started drawing he had no traditional math training and could only draw what he saw as math. Eventually a physicist saw his drawings and helped him get traditional mathematics training to be able to describe in equations the complex geometry of his drawings. He is currently a student studying mathematics in Washington state where he is learning traditional mathematics so he can better describe what he sees in a more traditional form. Many of the captions were written before he had any traditional math training. His drawing of E=MC^2 is based on the structure of space time at the quantum level and is based on the concept that there is a physical limit to observation which is the Planck length. It shows how at the smallest level, the structure of space time is a fractal. He does his own fractal diagrams and can also create new ones by request. His price for originals depends on the difficulty of the fractal. So sit back and enjoy the beauty of naturally occuring mathematics in pure geometric form connecting E=MC2 (energy) to art. All are HAND DRAWN using only a pencil, ruler and compass.

See Jason’s amazing work here: jason-padgett.artistwebsites.com

and on his Facebook page: www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1347537460