Re: Dangerous knowledge

[jim stasheff <jds@math.upenn.edu>]

Mike Stay wrote:
> Here's the summary from BBC's site:
>   

At least the Turing implication is very misleading - see below.

> 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.
>   

Certainly his suicide was because of his treatment as a homosexual and 
not that irrational - not `crazy'.

> 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.
>   



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