Dangerous Minds: Cantor, Boltzmann, Godel, Turing And The Limits Of Mathematics And Logic.
David Malone looks at the revolutionary discoveries and troubled mental lives of four brilliant mathematicians - Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing - who struggled against the accepted ideas of their time.
The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century’s mathematics. He believed he was God’s messenger and was eventually driven insane trying to prove his theories of infinity.
Ludwig Boltzmann’s struggle to prove the existence of atoms and probability eventually drove him to suicide. Kurt Gödel, the introverted confidant of Einstein, proved that there would always be problems which were outside human logic. His life ended in a sanatorium where he starved himself to death.
Finally, Alan Turing, the great Bletchley Park code breaker, father of computer science and convicted homosexual, died trying to prove that some things are fundamentally unprovable.
