![]() ![]() ![]() I looked at their photos today and searched their eyes for depression and desperation. Paul Eherenfest (1880–1933) killed himself nearly thirty years later. It wasn’t his first suicide attempt, but it was his most successful. Despondent, fearing disintegration of his theories, he hanged himself in 1906. Opposition to his ideas was harsh and his moods were volatile. Over a century ago the Viennese-born mathematician Ludwig Boltzmann (1844–1906) invented statistical mechanics, a powerful description of atomic behaviour based on probabilities. When I can, I like to forget about maths and grants and science and journals and research and heroes.īoltzmann is the one I remember most and his student Ehrenfest. I’d like to describe what I can see from here, so you can look with me and ease the solitude, but I never feel like giving rousing speeches about billions of stars and the glory of the cosmos. The lore is that their theories drove them mad, though I suspect they were just lonely, isolated by what they knew. ![]() Some of the great mathematicians killed themselves. The following is an excerpt from Janna Levin's 2002 book How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space -a personal account of her life and ideas in the form of unsent letters to her mother-republished by Princeton University Press on January 10th, 2023. ![]()
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