Murderous Mathematicians

Math Can Be Dangerous

By Dr. Kim Johnson, Lukeion Project Logic Sage

The life of a mathematician may seem completely devoid of intrigue, and perhaps of any interest at all. On the contrary! There are many mathematicians who lived exceptionally exciting lives, facing dangers like conspiracies, duels, and even murder.

Pythagoras

Pythagoras was one of the first to have the job description read, “mathematician.”  He was born around 470 B.C. in Samos, Greece and died in Croton, Italy, about 75 years later.  Most famous for the theorem named after him, he and his followers introduced other mathematical innovations.  They used letters to refer to angles and sides in the drawings they made in the sand.  They used colored chalk to demonstrate the equality of lines or angles. According to some legends, Pythagoras was the first teacher paid by his students. The Pythagoreans were an interesting cult. Adhering to a vegetarian lifestyle, men and women studied together. Using their superior math skills, they invented the 8-tone scale, determined by ratios between the notes.  

Pythagoras may or may not have authorized the first mathematical murder. One of the cult’s most strongly held beliefs was, “All is number,” or more accurately, “All is ratio.”  When one of his followers noticed the hypotenuse of a triangle with two equal legs could not be written as the ratio of two whole numbers, the followers of Pythagoras tipped him over the side of the boat. Most of what we know about Pythagoras comes from texts written well after his death so the details of this hypotenuse homicide are a bit unclear.

Perhaps Pythagoras deserved his eventual fate.  His school at Croton got involved in some politics which angered the local populace.  They burned down the Pythagorean academy and chased Pythagoras himself across the fields.  Some stories suggest he was killed because he refused to cross a field of beans, sacred to the Pythagoreans.

Descartes

Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was another mathematician who lived a life worthy of a spy novel.  He was very sickly as a child and, because of this, when he was sent to Jesuit school the rector allowed him to remain in bed until he felt like getting up.  As a young man he joined various volunteer armies mainly for the purpose of seeing the world rather than seeing battle.  His travels and conversations around Europe led to his philosophical and mathematical insights.

Descartes invented a way to locate points on the plane by noting how far they were from two lines, the “x-axis” and the “y-axis”.  Each point was identified by a coordinate pair, (x,y).  This was revolutionary because it allowed mathematicians to link geometry (great pictures and relationships between shapes) to algebra (filled with equations, x’s, and y’s). One can build a solution using equations — or one can graph the equation using the Cartesian plane to see the same solution.

Later in life Descartes retired to the Netherlands.  His peaceful life was interrupted by a letter from Princess Christina from Sweden. To her credit, she wanted to make the capital of Sweden an intellectual center.  Unlike Descartes, the princess enjoyed waking up incredibly early to study in a cold room and insisted that Descartes join her at 5 AM for lessons in philosophy and ethics.  He died later that year from pneumonia. Feel free to use this the next time someone wants you to get up early to study math. 

Galois

French mathematician Evariste Galois (1811-1832) lived a perilous life, at least for a mathematician. He grew up after the French Revolution and the Napoleonic empire, but politics problematic.  He was accepted into the second-best school in Paris, only to be kicked out when he complained that the students of the academy were not allowed to help overthrow Charles X.  

He was arrested twice for making controversial political statements including raising a toast to King Louis-Phillipe with a dagger in his glass. He wrote some brilliant papers but had a few were rejected due to political bias. One was lost when the person he sent it to, died before reviewing it. In the end, Galois got into a duel over the honor of a “floozy” (his words). The night before he died, he wrote several farewell letters, including directions to find his groundbreaking mathematical writings.  Thus he died at the age of 20 while his techniques for finding roots of equations inspired a new branch of mathematics named after him, Galois Theory. 

Math can be dangerous  

Not included in this list are many other mathematicians who died in mysterious or violent circumstances. Archimedes was murdered by a Roman soldier for telling the soldier not to mess up his drawings. Hypatia was murdered by a mob for mixing religion, politics, and mathematics. Cardano committed suicide on the day he had astrologically predicted he would die. Ramanujan died from cold weather and bad food in England. Fourrier died after falling down the stairs while wrapped in too many blankets. 

Although the Bureau of Labor and Statistics has ranked mathematician as one of the safest jobs in the world, mathematicians themselves have historically interesting deaths.