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S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
worrying about this until Georg Cantor fi gured out the solu-
tion. Speaking of whom . . .
10
Math
Nerds Gone Wild
(And by Wild, We Mean Nuts)
Georg Cantor’s (1845–1918) brilliance is such that other
mathematicians talk about him in reverent, almost mystical
tones. Th
e German mathematician David Hilbert (1862–
1943) once said, “No one shall expel us from the Paradise
that Cantor has created.” We’d try to explain that paradise,
except we don’t even remotely understand it.
Cantor basically
invented set theory, which allowed him to solve Zeno’s afore-
mentioned Achilles paradox by proving that some infi nities
are—get this—bigger than other infi nities. (Ergo, we are able
to walk through a door because all the infi nities involved in
getting halfway to the door are, relatively speaking, small.)
Such massively abstract thinking can make you feel a little
bonkers, and Cantor was no exception—he suff ered several
nervous breakdowns and spent the
last years of his life try-
ing to prove that God was a kind of infi nite number and that
Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays.
✖ ✖ ✖
Although he lives in hiding and communicates only via occa-
sional, thousands-of-pages-long letters to colleagues, Alex-
andre Grothendieck is widely considered one of the most
important mathematicians of the 20th century. A
radical en-
vironmentalist and Communist, Grothendieck has, since the
1980s, communicated his mathematical concepts primarily
133
in very long, handwritten letters
that circulate among math-
ematicians. Th
e 1,600-page
Long Walk Th
rough Galois Th
eory,
for instance, doesn’t strike us as a very compelling beach
read, but Grothendieck’s colleagues have been poring over it
for 25 years.
✖ ✖ ✖
In his 30s, British engineer and mathematician Oliver Heavi-
side (1850–1925) made important
discoveries in how to
transform diff erential equations into relatively simple alge-
bra, a discovery that had a profound impact on the lives of
advanced calculus students and absolutely no one else. In the
last decades of his life, Heaviside’s lifelong eccentricity
morphed into madness. He started painting his fi ngernails
pink—which while perfectly acceptable
now was weird in the
1920s—and he moved all the furniture out of his house, re-
placing everything with granite blocks of varying sizes.
✖ ✖ ✖
Shortly after the publication of his book on nonlinear functions
in 1996, Ukrainian-American mathematician Walter Petryshyn
discovered the book contained an error. Terrifi ed that he would
be the laughingstock of the nonlinear function community, he
went mad—in both senses of the word. His depression and
paranoia culminated with the murder of his wife. All of which
just goes to prove what we told our parents when they saw our
grades in calculus:
Chill out, man. It’s just
math
.
✖ ✖ ✖
One of the inarguable facts of the human condition is that
mathematicians, as a class, do not excel at dueling (see Tycho
Brahe, p. 228). But apparently no one ever told this to Eva-
riste Galois, the 19th-century Frenchman whose contribu-
tions to algebra got a theory named after him. Galois didn’t
live
to see himself get famous, though, because he died in a
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