From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/5305 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Mike Stay Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: Re: Dangerous knowledge Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:51:15 -0800 Message-ID: References: Reply-To: Mike Stay NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1259626319 24640 80.91.229.12 (1 Dec 2009 00:11:59 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Tue, 1 Dec 2009 00:11:59 +0000 (UTC) To: =?ISO-8859-1?B?Sm95YWwsIEFuZHLp?= , categories@mta.ca Original-X-From: categories@mta.ca Tue Dec 01 01:11:51 2009 Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from mailserv.mta.ca ([138.73.1.1]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.50) id 1NFGLP-0001LB-Hn for gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org; Tue, 01 Dec 2009 01:11:51 +0100 Original-Received: from Majordom by mailserv.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.61) (envelope-from ) id 1NFFUR-0002zL-JR for categories-list@mta.ca; Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:17:07 -0400 Original-Sender: categories@mta.ca Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:5305 Archived-At: 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 G=F6del 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 G=F6del, 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. --=20 Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://math.ucr.edu/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]