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 to insanity, leading them to eventually commit suicide.
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.
Very good documentary. One not-so-minor quibble, though, is the addition of Turing: three of the four mathematicians died because they could not deal with the ramifications (logical or political) of their ideas; Turing, on the other hand, died because of his homosexuality, not his mathematical ideas. If the idea is ‘dangerous knowledge’, then, Turning doesn’t fit. He only fits as a kind of associate to the others (in what seems to be the theme of the show), in that his mathematical work was closely related.
10 months ago
AW says:
Couldn’t agree with you more, Mike. It’s difficult to know what the programme maker was thinking, possibly “we need 90 minutes of this stuff – who else can we do?”, but Turing’s story, as you say, doesn’t really fit the theme.
Perhaps it should have simply been entitled ‘When Scientists Go Mad’ – that’s what Discovery would’ve called it
Very good documentary. One not-so-minor quibble, though, is the addition of Turing: three of the four mathematicians died because they could not deal with the ramifications (logical or political) of their ideas; Turing, on the other hand, died because of his homosexuality, not his mathematical ideas. If the idea is ‘dangerous knowledge’, then, Turning doesn’t fit. He only fits as a kind of associate to the others (in what seems to be the theme of the show), in that his mathematical work was closely related.
Couldn’t agree with you more, Mike. It’s difficult to know what the programme maker was thinking, possibly “we need 90 minutes of this stuff – who else can we do?”, but Turing’s story, as you say, doesn’t really fit the theme.
Perhaps it should have simply been entitled ‘When Scientists Go Mad’ – that’s what Discovery would’ve called it