The lives of four mathematicians and their work which shattered all notions of certainty is explored in this documentary… dangerous ideas that undermine - then as now - the established order of things:
“The film begins with Georg Cantor, the great mathematician whose work proved to be the foundation for much of the 20th-century 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 homosexual, died trying to prove that some things are fundamentally unprovable.”
Interspersed are interviews with leading mathematicians of today… Gregory Chaitin especially is fun and engaging and - by lucky coincidence - I just picked up his book Meta Math!
