Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances
1–10 of 41 posts
Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances
#2Grothendieck apparently died recently:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck#Retirem...
Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances
#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 honourable mention for particularly poor timing.
Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances
#4No Hypatia? Skinned alive by Christian mob..
Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances
#5Grothendieck apparently died recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck#Retirem...
Unfortunately, we recently lost Ralph Faudree under terrible circumstances as well.
Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances
#6"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…
since age doesn't seem to be a concern, how about Paul Erdos having a heart attack (and later dying) at a math convention?
Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances
#7"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 himself in some obscure marginalia.
The only mystery surrounding Fermat's understanding of his own "Last Theorem" is precisely which false proof he most likely had.
Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances
#8"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 experiments using potassium cyanide to dissolve gold to electroplate spoons. He was famously clumsy, there's evidence that the room he was using for experiments smelled of cyanide, and the autopsy found evidence more consistent with poisoning from inhalation than ingestion. And I've never found the suggestion that Turing staged his suicide to look like an accident credible; if he'd actually tried I imagine he could have done a vastly better job.)
Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances
#9John von Neumann -- December 28, 1903 – February 8, 1957 (cancer) -- was a Hungarian and later American pure and applied mathematician, physicist, inventor and polymath. He made major contributions to a number of fields,[2] including mathematics (foundations of mathematics, functional analysis, ergodic theory, geometry, topology, and numerical analysis), physics (quantum mechanics, hydrodynamics, and fluid dynamics), economics (game theory), computing (Von Neumann architecture, linear programming, self-replicating machines, stochastic computing), and statistics. [1]
"A von Neumann biographer, Norman Macrae, has speculated that the cancer was caused by von Neumann's presence at the Operation Crossroads nuclear tests held in 1946 at Bikini Atoll." [2]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_von_Neumann#Later_life
Re: Mathematicians who died under unfortunate or unfitting circumstances
#10Grothendieck apparently died recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Grothendieck#Retirem...
Unfortunately, we recently lost Ralph Faudree under terrible circumstances as well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Faudree
The page doesn't even mention his death, save for wikipedia classifying the page under '2015 deaths'.