Re: Dangerous knowledge

[Charles Wells <charles@abstractmath.org>]

The graphic novel Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H.
Papadimitriou has the relation between being logicians and madness as
one of its themes.  The novel is actually quite good, and I recommend
it, but they make too much of the insanity stuff.  One saving grace is
that the novel has interludes featuring the authors and the artists
arguing about that theme and other aspects of the novel.

Charles Wells

2009/11/30 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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