David Malone's Dangerous Knowledge

The documentary, “Dangerous Knowledge” by David Malone, focuses on four major mathematicians, Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing. For each mathematician, their genius drove them insane and eventually led them to commit suicide; however, their intelligence has greatly affected todays mathematics. This documentary discusses many of the questions that mathematical thinkers are trying to answer. As a child, Georg Cantor heard voices, which he believed was God, calling him into mathematics. Starting with Galileo, many mathematics could not understand the concept of infinity and why it is true; they decided to accept it, but not truly understand it. However, in the nineteenth century, Cantor forced a revision of nearly all
Statistical mechanics “explains and predicts how the properties of atoms (such as mass, charge, and structure) determine the visible properties of matter (such as viscosity, thermal conductivity, and diffusion).” (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica) The challenge of proving the existence of atoms and probability eventually led him to commit suicide. In addition, he also published a series of papers in which he showed that the second law of thermodynamics in 1870. Boltzmann and James Clark Maxwell created a law for the distribution of energy among the various parts of a system at a specific temperature and derived the theorem of equipartition of energy. This law states that the average amount of energy involved in each different direction of motion of an atom is the same. (The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica) For example, the theory helps explain the motion and speed of a gas, since a molecule in a gas could have any one of a huge number of possible speeds. Similar to Cantor, his work was debated and misunderstood by scholars for many