I’ll never forget my first visit to U of T. I arrived few days before the grad-visit day. I had a meeting with professor Jepson, together with another candidate student. After the meeting, the professor took us and another student who was about my age to lunch at an Indian restaurant. All the way there that student was trying to impress the professor, talking about eigenvectors of Markov chains and complicated probabilities that I wasn’t really following. I didn’t understand him, because he was already admitted, so I saw no reason to impress the professor. It went on like this all lunch. At the end, the student pulled his credit card and paid on all four of us. It looked a bit suspicious, but I was new to Toronto and had a lot to learn. The next day was the official grad-visit day, and we had short presentations by professors about their research. That student watched the presentations patiently. When they ended, he rose up and presented his own work. That "student" was professor X.
Professor X was appointed assistant professor at U of T before he was 30 after declining an offer from MIT. His area was machine learning, with applications in voice and image processing, bioinformatics and even astronomy. He did research at Caltech, University College London, Toronto, Bell labs, Google, MIT, and this year he moved to New-York University.
On January 12, the same day of the Haiti earthquake, professor X committed a suicide by jumping from his balcony in New-York. He was 37. Sometimes people who were exceptionally lucky take it hard when they get a bite of bad luck. I don’t know the exact details, but from what I heard his babies were born with medical problems. It is possible that the move to New-York was related to their treatment. They might had some financial pressures. Add to that the move to NYC which is considered a stressful city, especially for Canadians, on top of the usual academic pressure, and the personality type of someone who "never fails in anything".
Many people believe that academia is a safe and secure working place, but the reality is that many academics are living on the edge. It is not just because they constantly try to meet deadly deadlines. Doing research brings with it the responsibility that knowledge does not get lost, and some of these people feel they always carry a bookstack on their back. In addition, these people volunteered to bang their heads against some of the world’s toughest problems. These are your problems too, even if you never heard about them, but they made them their own personal problems. Although it is becoming popular to publish failures sold as successes, most people know exactly what the worth of their work is, and that can be very depressing. Sometimes a student-professor meeting can look like a meeting with a psychologist (it is not always clear who is the psychologist and who is the patient).
In order to focus, researchers need to detach as much as possible from the real world. The academic world is not less real than the real world, and in some sense it is even more real and accurate, but it requires a different mindset. The problems occur when people need to jump back and forth between the real and the academic worlds. Sometimes these jumps land on the head. In 2006, a promising graduate student in our math department (twice among the top 10 in the Putnam competition) jumped to the river in his hometown. A rumor says he left a note saying he realized he will never be as smart as Euler.
