The Los Angeles Times has the interesting article Autism hidden in plain sight.  I’ll quote one of the cases described in the article.

Karl Wittig, a retired engineer from New York, had always questioned why so few social skills came naturally to him.

A diary his mother kept in the 1950s suggests he was not an ordinary child.

“This last few weeks, he doesn’t pile the blocks anymore,” she wrote when he was 2. “He likes to put one next to the other, making a big row of 48.”

Two years later, he talked nonstop about wires, switches, light bulbs and Thomas Edison.

Wittig went on to earn undergraduate and master’s degrees from Cornell University and New York University in physics, electrical engineering and computer science. In the research laboratories where he worked, he felt he fit in.

“I went into a field full of eccentric people,” Witting recalled. “I was just another eccentric person.”

Wittig said he eventually figured out how to behave in social situations — to refrain from correcting other people’s mistakes, flaunting his math abilities or rambling on about his own interests. He married a former nun 18 years his senior. She died of cancer after two decades together. Wittig described the marriage as happy.

Still, he wanted to understand what made him different. So at age 44, he brought his mother’s diary to a psychiatrist, who evaluated him and concluded he had Asperger’s disorder, a mild form of autism.

“I had been waiting for an explanation for these issues my entire life,” recalled Wittig, now 55, who lives alone in the apartment he once shared with his wife. “Finally, here it was.”

Recognize anybody you know?