I am reading the book on Grigori Perelman by Masha Gessen "Perfect Rigor: A Genius and the  Mathematical Breakthrough  of the Century", and the following paragraph is completely on-topic:

> More than forty years after Hans Asperger, a British psychologist
> named Simon Baron-Cohen came to study autism and Asperger’s syndrome
> and figured out several things that seem to me to be very useful in
> understanding Grigory Perelman. First, Baron-Cohen suggested that the
> autistic brain was lopsided in a particular way. Where a neuronormal
> brain has the ability to both systemize and empathize, the autistic
> brain might be excellent at the former but is always lousy at the
> latter - causing Baron-Cohen to dub the autistic brain “the extreme
> male brain.” Baron-Cohen defined systemizing as “the drive to analyze
> and/or build a system (of any kind) based on identifying
> input-operation-output rules” and theorized that great systemizers
> might be at increased risk for autism. When he tested this theory on a
> population of Cambridge University undergraduates, it turned out that
> the mathematicians among them were three to seven times more likely
> than other students to have a diagnosis of an autistic condition.
> Baron-Cohen also developed the AQ, or the autism-spectrum quotient,
> test, which he administered to adults with Asperger’s or
> high-functioning autism as well as to randomly selected controls and
> Cambridge students and winners of the British Mathematical Olympiad.
> The correlation between math and autism and/or Asperger’s was proved
> again: mathematicians scored higher than other scientists, who scored
> higher than students in the humanities, who scored roughly the same as
> the random controls. I took the AQ test too when Baron-Cohen e-mailed
> it to me, and scored as high as Baron-Cohen would probably expect a
> former math-school student to score, which is very high. Grigory
> Perelman, as far as I know, never took the AQ test and certainly
> cannot be diagnosed by someone who has not talked to him, though after
> I spent an hour on the phone describing Perelman to Baron-Cohen, the
> famous psychologist volunteered to fly to St. Petersburg to evaluate
> the famous mathematician - who sounded so very much like many of his
> clients - thus joining the long list of people who had volunteered
> help that Perelman did not welcome.

I would like to balance with the following extract coming from the [Book Review for *Notices of the AMS*][1] by Donal O’Shea:

> Gessen argues that the people who surrounded Perelman sheltered him
> from ordinary reality, allowing him to mistakenly believe that the
> world is as he thinks it should be. This elaborate narrative is
> totally conjectural—Gessen has no evidence about what Perelman
> believes. Undaunted, she goes on to diagnose Perelman with a
> full-blown case of Asperger’s syndrome. I simply don’t know enough to
> evaluate these claims and am entirely unconvinced.  Everyone agrees
> that Perelman lives simply, so why not  make  the  simpler  assumption
> that  he  wants privacy and does not want to be encumbered with  fame
> or money? Perelman’s recent refusal of the million-dollar Clay
> Millennium award suggests this, particularly since the Clay Institute
> made it clear that Perelman would not have to participate in any
> public ceremony.    
> Even putting aside the evidentiary questions, I
> found the second half of the book offensive. I felt uncomfortable 
> reading  about  a  living  individual   who wishes to remain out of
> public sight. Publicly diagnosing someone with a serious psychological
> disorder  without  consultation  seems  ethically questionable,  not 
> to  mention  presumptuous. Doing any sort of mathematics requires
> precision, careful  attention  to  meaning,  and  concentration.
> Gessen’s  account  of  British  psychiatrist  Simon Baron-Cohen’s 
> autism-spectrum  quotient  test, and  the  purported  strong 
> correlation  between   high-functioning autism and mathematical
> ability in  a  test  population,  runs  dangerously  close  to
> medicalizing precisely these traits. Gessen’s presumption does not end
> with psychiatric expertise. She opines freely on Perelman’s work,
> characterizing  it  as  solving  the  “very,  very  complicated
> olympiad problem” into which she has Hamilton casting Thurston’s
> geometrization conjecture. She cavalierly ranks top mathematicians in
> descending order from those who open new fields by posing questions 
> no  one  has  thought  to  ask  (such  as Poincaré and Thurston) to
> those who devise ways to answer those questions (such as Hamilton) to
> the bottom of the top, those poor souls (such as Perelman)  who  take 
> the  last  steps  in  completing proofs.  Mathematicians  will  easily
> discern  the depth  of Gessen’s  mathematical  ignorance,  but others
> will not, and it is depressing to see Perelman’s  inspiring 
> achievement  and  powerful  new ideas reduced to psychobabble:
> “Speaking of the imaginary four-dimensional space, he referred to
> things that could and could not occur ‘in nature’. In essence, he
> [Perelman] was able to do in mathematics  what  he  had  tried  to  do
> in  life:  grasp  at once all the possibilities of nature and
> annihilate everything  that  fell  outside  that  realm - castrati
> voices, cars, anti-Semitism, and any other uncomfortable singularity.”

Here is the abstracts of the papers of Baron-Cohen et al. "[Mathematical Talent is Linked to Autism][2]": 

> **Abstract**: A total of 378 mathematics undergraduates (selected for being strong
> at “systemizing”) and 414 students in other (control) disciplines at
> Cambridge University were surveyed with two questions: (1) Do you have
> a diagnosed autism spectrum condition? (2) How many relatives in your
> immediate family have a diagnosed autism spectrum condition? Results
> showed seven cases of autism in the math group (or 1.85%) vs one case
> of autism in the control group (or 0.24%), a ninefold difference that
> is significant. Controlling for sex and general population sampling,
> this represents a three- to sevenfold increase for autism spectrum
> conditions among the mathematicians. There were 7 of 1,405 (or 0.5%)
> cases of autism in the immediate families of the math group vs 2 of
> 1,669 (or 0.1%) cases in the immediate families of the control group,
> which again is a significant difference. These results confirm a link
> between autism and systemizing, and they suggest this link is genetic
> given the association between autism and first-degree relatives of
> mathematicians.

and "[The Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ): Evidence from Asperger Syndrome/High-Functioning Autism, Malesand Females, Scientists and Mathematicians][3]":

> **Abstract**: Currently there are no brief, self-administered instruments for measuring the degree to which an adult with normal
> intelligence has the traits associated with the autistic spectrum. In
> this paper, we report on a new instrument to assess this: the
> Autism-Spectrum Quotient (AQ). Individuals score in the range 0–50.
> Four groups of subjects were assessed: Group 1: 58 adults with
> Asperger syndrome (AS) or high-functioning autism (HFA); Group 2: 174
> randomly selected controls. Group 3: 840 students in Cambridge
> University; and Group 4: 16 winners of the UK Mathematics Olympiad.
> The adults with AS/HFA had a mean AQ score of 35.8 (SD = 6.5),
> significantly higher than Group 2 controls (M = 16.4, SD = 6.3). 80%
> of the adults with AS/HFA scored 32+, versus 2% of controls. Among the
> controls, men scored slightly but significantly higher than women. No
> women scored extremely highly (AQ score 34+) whereas 4% of men did so.
> Twice as many men (40%) as women (21%) scored at intermediate levels
> (AQ score 20+). Among the AS/HFA group, male and female scores did not
> differ significantly. The students in Cambridge University did not
> differ from the randomly selected control group, but scientists
> (including mathematicians) scored significantly higher than both
> humanities and social sciences students, confirming an earlier study
> that autistic conditions are associated with scientific skills. Within
> the sciences, mathematicians scored highest. This was replicated in
> Group 4, the Mathematics Olympiad winners scoring significantly higher
> than the male Cambridge humanities students. 6% of the student sample
> scored 327plus; on the AQ. On interview, 11 out of 11 of these met
> three or more DSM-IV criteria for AS/HFA, and all were studying
> sciences/mathematics, and 7 of the 11 met threshold on these criteria.
> Test—retest and interrater reliability of the AQ was good. The AQ is
> thus a valuable instrument for rapidly quantifying where any given
> individual is situated on the continuum from autism to normality. Its
> potential for screening for autism spectrum conditions in adults of
> normal intelligence remains to be fully explored.


  [1]: https://www.ams.org/notices/201101/rtx110100056p.pdf
  [2]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12110-007-9014-0
  [3]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1005653411471