Indeed, Jonah, alcoholoism is pretty rare among good mathematicians. The only case that comes to mind is Sir William Rowan Hamilton, and his life was so desperately miserable one only wonders he didn’t drink more.

(At age 19 Hamilton met and fell deeply in love with Catherine Disney, who seems to have loved him back. At the insistence of her family, Catherine was married off to an older, much more “suitable” man the following year. Hamilton went on loving her, though, to his last days, and this hopeless love blighted his life. Hers, too, probably; her marriage was not a happy one, and she and her husband eventually separated. Hamilton himself married at random, to a woman he cared nothing for. Says his biographer Thomas Hankins: “No person ever replaced Catherine in Hamilton’s affections from the moment he first saw her until his death, and it is difficult to imagine anyone being loved with more constancy over a longer period of time.” Permitted to visit Catherine on her deathbed in 1853, Hamilton gave her a copy of his book Lectures on Quaternions.)

More mysteriously, fat mathematicians are very unusual. Hamilton again is something of an exception. He was at least portly.