Documentary Description
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.
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