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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

#21

Post by tedunangst »

compbio wrote: post #17
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…

Kramer obviously disappeared into a wormhole as part of his research into faster than light communications.

Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances

#22

Post by cperciva »

cbd1984 wrote: post #7
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…

Fermat lived almost three decades after he proposed his "Last Theorem" and was hardly inactive in that period. Had he even thought he actually had a proof, he would have published it, and we would all know it was wrong. A far more likely scenario is that he had a false proof, discovered he had a false proof at some point after he made his marginal note, and didn't bother to publish the fact he had made a fool of hims…

Fermat lived almost three decades after he proposed his "Last Theorem" and was hardly inactive in that period.

Indeed, just to clarify: The reason it is called his "Last" theorem is that it was the last of his many claims to have been neither proven nor refuted; nothing to do with when he made the claim.

Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances

#23

Post by anoopelias »

Rajeev Motwani

Rajeev Motwani was a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University whose research focused on theoretical computer science. He was an early advisor and supporter of companies including Google and PayPal, and a special advisor to Sequoia Capital. He was a winner of the Gödel Prize in 2001.

Further,

Motwani was found dead in his pool in the backyard of his Atherton home on June 5, 2009

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

Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances

#24

Post by stiff »

Two whole schools of mathematics died in "unfortunate and unfitting circumstances", namely the Lwów school and the Warsaw school:

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_AB-Aktion_in_Poland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Ruziewicz

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82odzimierz_Sto%C5%BCek

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

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_%C5%81omnicki

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Saks

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

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Dickstein_%28mathematici...

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%B3zef_Marcinkiewicz

Some members emigrated before or during the war and spread all over the world, mostly in the US. After 1945 almost none of the original members were still alive and in Poland/Ukraine.

Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances

#27

Post by kriro »

I once had a couple of slides on Cantor->Turing->Gödel that finished of the AI101 lecture I held. One could create a narrative that their particular work lead to their unfortunate deaths and I'm pretty sure I actually read that somewhere but think it is far fetched (particularly for Turing) and didn't mention it.

Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances

#29

Post by ajuc »

stiff wrote: post #24

Two whole schools of mathematics died in "unfortunate and unfitting circumstances", namely the Lwów school and the Warsaw school: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massacre_of_Lviv_professors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_AB-Aktion_in_Poland http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Ruziewicz http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W%C5%82odzimierz_Sto%C5%BCek http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herman_Auerbach http://en.wikipedia.…

Many of L'viv (then Lwów) professors (for example Stefan Banach, of the Banach-Tarski paradox fame) survived only because they were hired as "lice feeders" in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Weigl institute, and he managed to persuade Germans that they need consistent data, so they can't take his feeders away just because they are Jewish or Polish.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feeder_of_lice#Lw.C3.B3w_academ...

Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances

#30

Post by olalonde »

On a related note, "Dangerous Knowledge" is a great documentary "about four of the most brilliant mathematicians of all time, Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, their genius, their tragic madness and their ultimate suicides". http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1520274/
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