1. SOME MATHEMATICAL CHARACTERS, CRACKPOTS & CRAZIES Chuck Groetsch MAASE – March 28, 2008

2. Some of you may have met mathematicians and wondered how they got that way. Tom Lehrer

3. TAKING HILBERT AT HIS WORD

4. Mathematics is a dangerous profession; an appreciable proportion of us go mad. J.E. Littlewood 1885-1977

5. Interesting or Amusing Cases

7. “Grand Law of the Generation of Quantities” “Key to the Universe”

8. Michel Chasles 1793 - 1880 Caveat Emptor! FRS, FLMS, Copley Medalist

9. DAVID HILBERT 1862-1945 Wir mussen wissen. Wir werden wissen.

10. Hilbert’s funeral oration:

11. Oliver Heaviside 1850-1925

12. Grigori Perelman Keep your medal and your money

13. Alexander Grothendieck "Through my whole life my ambition as a mathematician, or rather my passion and joy, has ever been to uncover self- evident truths. “

14. A.G. and Friends

15. SAD CASES

16. Georg Cantor 1845 - 1918 A set is a Many that allows itself to be thought of as a One

18. An equation means nothing to me unless it expresses a thought of God. SRINIVASA RAMANUJAN 1887-1920

19. Alan Turing 1912 - 1954 Father of the programmable computer; artificial intelligence.

20. Turing the marathoner Turing the Enigma cracker

21. Turing Test A machine pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman …..

22. Dip the apple in the brew. Let the sleeping death seep through. Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs

25. Gödel has gone completely crazy … A. Einstein He has voted for Eisenhower!

27. JOHN FORBES NASH 1928 - This man is a genius.

28. The Nash equilibrium; Nash imbedding theorem; Nash-Moser Theorem, … Nobel laureate 1994 The Phantom of Fine Hall “A religious figure of great, but secret importance” The Emperor of Antarctica

29. Then gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably with the rejection of politically oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of effort.

30. SCARY CASES

31. Academie des Sciences Becquerel Prize 1948 It’s a matter of mathematical logic. … I began my work at the time of that famous meal. It is not finished yet. I wanted to know how things were. The ‘mad mathematician of Charenton’

32. Oswald Teichmüller Oswald Teichmueller 1913-1943 Aryan students want Aryan mathematics, not Jewish mathematics …

33. Ludwig Bieberbach 1886-1982

34. Deutsche Mathematik The important task for ‘National Socialist science’ is to recognize the existence of the ‘German essence’ in works of science and to then ‘proceed to action’. Ludwig Bieberbach

35. U. Bomber

36. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that the danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. G.K. Chesterton

37. Wir Mathematiker sind alle ein bischen meschuge Landau