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Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances

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Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances

#12

Post by ddlatham »

Tycho Brahe

Tycho suddenly contracted a bladder or kidney ailment after attending a banquet in Prague, and died eleven days later, on 24 October 1601. According to Kepler's first hand account, Tycho had refused to leave the banquet to relieve himself because it would have been a breach of etiquette.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tycho_Brahe#Death

Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances

#15

Post by dubya »

thisandthat wrote: post #14

Anyone else between 1950s and 2010s?

Oded Schramm died in 2008 on solo climb in Washington State. Really should have won a Fields medal for his work on SLE (Schramm-Loewner evolution), as his collaborator Wendelin Werner received.

Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances

#17

Post by compbio »

thisandthat wrote: post #14

Anyone else between 1950s and 2010s?

Gareth Williams (26 September 1978 – c. 16 August 2010) was a Welsh mathematician and employee of GCHQ seconded to the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6) who was found dead in suspicious circumstances at a Security Service safe house flat in Pimlico, London, on 23 August 2010. His decomposing naked remains were found in a red North Face bag, padlocked from the outside, in the bath of the main bedroom's en-suite bathroom.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Gareth_Williams

Philip Taylor Kramer (July 12, 1952 – February 12, 1995) was a bass guitar player for the rock group Iron Butterfly during the 1970s. After this he obtained a night school degree in aerospace engineering, he worked on the MX missile guidance system for a contractor of the US Department of Defense and later in the computer industry on fractal compression, facial recognition systems, and advanced communications. His disappearance on February 12, 1995 caused a mystery lasting for years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Taylor_Kramer

Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances

#18

Post by nicklaf »

Hermann Minkowski. Died suddenly of appendicitis at the age of 44.

"In the early years of his scientific career, Albert Einstein considered mathematics to be a mere tool in the service of physical intuition. In later years, he came to consider mathematics as the very source of scientific creativity. A main motive behind this change was the influence of two prominent German mathematicians: David Hilbert and Hermann Minkowski." [1]

[1] http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Minkowsk...

Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances

#20

Post by tedunangst »

Lazare wrote: post #8
542458 wrote: post #3

"Turing committed suicide in 1954, by eating a cyanide-laced apple, although the circumstances of his death were ambiguous enough (deliberately) so that his mother could maintain, for her own sake, that it was an accident." I feel that this is an unfair statement. There are lots of reasons to believe Turning's death wasn't suicide. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Death I also think that Fermat deserves an ho…

I was going to make the same point. It could well have been a suicide, but the evidence is at best circumstantial, and there's fairly suggestive evidence pointing at it being accidental. I don't think it's controversial to say that no modern inquest would render a verdict of suicide given the very limited evidence that had been gathered. (I personally think his death was an accident; probably the result if his experi…

Turing's suicide is an important part of the argument that the government's homophobia drove him to commit suicide.
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