My first thought was your second option, that they both require high IQ and thus being good at one lets you be good at the other.
However, I didn’t agree with the prediction that you’d find this in many other pairs of fields, as many fields require getting a lot of background knowledge before you can contribute. What I’d predict here is that (a) this is fortunately/unfortunately less true in philosophy so mathematicians can easily get to the forefront, and (b) top philosophers who’re interested in mathematics do not do the sort of mathematics that requires many years of training (e.g. they would talk more about what mathematics means, and what it means to prove something).
If you’d found a trend where the top philosophers had been contributing to cutting edge math research that had typically required multiple years of training, that would change my mind (and surprise me).
My first thought was your second option, that they both require high IQ and thus being good at one lets you be good at the other.
However, I didn’t agree with the prediction that you’d find this in many other pairs of fields, as many fields require getting a lot of background knowledge before you can contribute. What I’d predict here is that (a) this is fortunately/unfortunately less true in philosophy so mathematicians can easily get to the forefront, and (b) top philosophers who’re interested in mathematics do not do the sort of mathematics that requires many years of training (e.g. they would talk more about what mathematics means, and what it means to prove something).
If you’d found a trend where the top philosophers had been contributing to cutting edge math research that had typically required multiple years of training, that would change my mind (and surprise me).