Scatter Brained

C H A P T E R   5

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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 

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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