> The solution for these irreducible representations came to Raskin at a moment when his personal life was filled with chaos. A few weeks after he and Færgeman posted their paper online, Raskin had to rush his pregnant wife to the hospital, then return home to take his son to his first day of kindergarten. Raskin’s wife remained in the hospital until the birth of their second child six weeks later, and during this time Raskin’s life revolved around keeping life normal for his son and driving in endless loops between home, his son’s school and the hospital. “My whole life was the car and taking care of people,” he said.
> He took to calling Gaitsgory on his drives to talk math. By the end of the first of those weeks, Raskin had realized that he could reduce the problem of irreducible representations to proving three facts that were all within reach. “For me it was this amazing period,” he said. His personal life was “filled with anxiety and dread about the future. For me, math is always this very grounding and meditative thing that takes me out of that kind of anxiety.”
"If I'm designing a Research Institute, would the ideal design be something where you have babies screaming, and people are sleep-deprived, and you know, and are bombarded with responsibilities, and then they would produce better research?"
I have however the impression that some distractions of life are more fundamental than others. If the distraction is that you might not have food tomorrow or you fear for your safety, indeed I doubt you can focus on research. However other things like babies crying and "responsibilities" are only a distraction if you let them. My mental model is that "doing research" is somewhere is Maslow's pyramid which is not the bottom, but it's not as high up as most people would expect either. I'd like to hear other people's thoughts.
And "this stuff" to which you refer is the intended output of their full time jobs*. So presumably, they find time to work on it in the same way a software developer finds time to write code. You just sit down and do it, because you are being paid to do it.
*Did I miss something about how these papers were developed in their spare time?
As an aside, Europeans have families, lives, distractions etc just like people in the US. Source: have lived in Europe for 30+ years. Have a family and lots of distractions. Have not proved any major mathematical theorems. (yet I suppose- there's still time)