SOME MATHEMATICAL CHARACTERS, CRACKPOTS & CRAZIES Chuck Groetsch MAASE – March 28, 2008

Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way. Tom Lehrer

TAKING HILBERT AT HIS WORD

Mathematics is a dangerous profession; an appreciable proportion of us go mad. J.E. Littlewood

Interesting or Amusing Cases

“Grand Law of the Generation of Quantities” “Key to the Universe”

Michel Chasles Caveat Emptor! FRS, FLMS, Copley Medalist

DAVID HILBERT Wir mussen wissen. Wir werden wissen.

Hilbert’s funeral oration:

Oliver Heaviside

Grigori Perelman Keep your medal and your money

Alexander Grothendieck "Through my whole life my ambition as a mathematician, or rather my passion and joy, has ever been to uncover self- evident truths. “

A.G. and Friends

SAD CASES

Georg Cantor A set is a Many that allows itself to be thought of as a One

An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God. SRINIVASA RAMANUJAN

Alan Turing Father of the programmable computer; artificial intelligence.

Turing the marathoner Turing the Enigma cracker

Turing Test A machine pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman …..

Dip the apple in the brew. Let the sleeping death seep through. Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs

Gödel has gone completely crazy … A. Einstein He has voted for Eisenhower!

JOHN FORBES NASH This man is a genius.

The Nash equilibrium; Nash imbedding theorem; Nash-Moser Theorem, … Nobel laureate 1994 The Phantom of Fine Hall “A religious figure of great, but secret importance” The Emperor of Antarctica

Then gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably with the rejection of politically oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of effort.

SCARY CASES

Academie des Sciences Becquerel Prize 1948 It’s a matter of mathematical logic. … I began my work at the time of that famous meal. It is not finished yet. I wanted to know how things were. The ‘mad mathematician of Charenton’

Oswald Teichmüller Oswald Teichmueller Aryan students want Aryan mathematics, not Jewish mathematics …

Ludwig Bieberbach

Deutsche Mathematik The important task for ‘National Socialist science’ is to recognize the existence of the ‘German essence’ in works of science and to then ‘proceed to action’. Ludwig Bieberbach

U. Bomber

Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that the danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. G.K. Chesterton

Wir Mathematiker sind alle ein bischen meschuge Landau