Re: Dangerous knowledge

[Mike Stay <metaweta@gmail.com>]

Here's the summary from BBC's site:

In this one-off documentary, David Malone looks at four brilliant
mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan
Turing - whose genius has profoundly affected us, but which tragically
drove them insane and eventually led to them all committing suicide.

The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work
proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century mathematics.
He believed he was God's messenger and was eventually driven insane
trying to prove his theories of infinity.

Ludwig Boltzmann's struggle to prove the existence of atoms and
probability eventually drove him to suicide. Kurt Gödel, the
introverted confidant of Einstein, proved that there would always be
problems which were outside human logic. His life ended in a
sanatorium where he starved himself to death.

Finally, Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of
computer science and homosexual, died trying to prove that some things
are fundamentally unprovable.

The film also talks to the latest in the line of thinkers who have
continued to pursue the question of whether there are things that
mathematics and the human mind cannot know. They include Greg Chaitin,
mathematician at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center, New York, and
Roger Penrose.

Dangerous Knowledge tackles some of the profound questions about the
true nature of reality that mathematical thinkers are still trying to
answer today.
-- 
Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com
http://math.ucr.edu/~mike
http://reperiendi.wordpress.com


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