Dangerous Knowledge

Dangerous Knowledge is a two-part documentary series taking a look at four of the most brilliant mathematicians of all time, Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing.

By documenting their lives, their genius, their tragic madness and ultimately their own self inflicted death, Dangerous Knowledge seeks to unlock the mind of the geniuses and the math they worked with.

Episode 1

Our host David Malone explores the math, philosophy and lives of Georg Cantor and Ludwig Boltzmann in the first episode.

In this episode we’ll visit George Cantor, a brilliant mathematician who’s work on infinity created ripples in the scientific and philosophical communities, and Ludwig Boltzmann, father of statistical mechanics, which explains and predicts how the properties of atoms and so much more.

Born both with a genius mind and a distraught mental health, today their conditions would have been characterised by being clinically depressed and bipolar.

Episode 2

Dangerous Knowledge continues in episode two, where David Malone visits the life story of Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing.

Kurt Gödel was considered to be one of the more significant thinkers of the 20th century along with Aristotle and Gottlob Frege, a genius who propelled science and our society forward.

And Alan Turing, the father of modern computer science. He formed the concept of the algorithms and computations with one of his inventions, the Turing machine.

Both had profound implications on society as we know it today and both died of mental health conditions.

Today, some would assume Alan Turing’s sexual suppressed side of being gay coupled with having Asperger’s syndrome could have driven him to suicide.

In Kurt Gödel’s case, his later years were plagued by depression and many nervous breakdowns which eventually led him to starving himself to death.