After 47 years in her desert cocoon, avoiding human contact, Dr. Helen Goldman emerges to receive a prestigious award in theoretical mathematics. In her very anticipated acceptance talk, she reveals her own story.

She was a practicing clinical psychologist whose clients included many major television and movie celebrities. At a party, she was introduced to the drug LSD. “Ladies and gentlemen, I had never had a more passionate, a more pleasurable, a more satisfying experience than listening to Wagner’s operas while on LSD.”

The drug also unleashed her considerable (but previously unknown) talent in theoretical mathematics.

She left her comfortable Los Angeles lifestyle for a desert shanty where she was free to do only mathematics. To overcome the prejudices of the powerful “special elect” who control what ideas are to be published and shared, she resorted to deception and manipulation. “Had I not packaged my ideas as I did, they would probably never have been published.”

Her strategies worked. In the introduction to her award, the speaker calls her “an individual of extraordinary brilliance. A mind of unlimited capacity. A master mathematician.”