posted on June 27, 2001 12:57:53 PM new
The University of Michigan has accepted 15,000 personal papers
of Unabomber-murderer Ted Kaczynski (an alumnus) and is housing
them with, according to a San Francisco Chronicle report, "all
the academic solemnity that, say, Churchill's papers received
when they went to Cambridge." Said a Kaczynski biographer, "Ted
is obsessed with his public image." The university's decision
is ironic, said Kaczynski's former prosecutor Steven Lapham,
who points out that the man's private journals, introduced in
his trial, showed that contrary to his alleged social and
environmental reasons for his serial bombings, he merely
"enjoyed taking other people's lives because he could."
What a relief to know that the personal philosophy will be preserved for future generations.
posted on June 27, 2001 02:01:48 PM new
In addition to being a murderer, Ted was also a mathmatical genius. I suspect that his papers may contain some meanderings into this field.
Preserving and studying his papers may shed light on what went wrong with the toys in his attic.
But in any event, I should hope that all archives preserve the good, the bad, and the ugly. No one can be certain how censoring may impact the validitiy of future representations and world views. Deciding what to preserve is more art than science and essentially helps create a culture's history and sense of identity.
3 centuries from now Ted may be seen as a visionary hero, no one knows for certain.
posted on June 27, 2001 10:57:09 PM new
There's a guy, a mathmatical genius named Theodore Stralinski. He was a doctoral candidate at Stanford when he was given an ambiguous evaluation by his professor and mentor. It enraged him, and he bonked the guy with a claw hammer and killed him.
Many years later he became eligible for parole but refused. He refused several times and served out his full sentence. When asked about it he said 'why would I want to leave here? I have room, food, and can study'.
After his release from prison he quickly obtained employment with the City of Palo Alto as a mechanical engineer. Stanford is in Palo Alto, and when word got out about his job there public outcry forced the city to terminate his employment.
I thought it sad that his crime would follow him that way, and often wonder what has become of him. Focused genius is a rare thing, and society should not squander it, particularly not by the judgements of the general public which, on the whole, manifests it's presence through repeated displays of collective idiocy.
posted on June 28, 2001 05:34:47 AM new
Speaking of misunderstood and mistreated genius, is anyone here aware of the sad story of Alan Turing?
Turing was arguably the finest theoretical mathematician produced by the 20th century. He was also mechanically adept.
He worked at Bletchley Park during World War II and was one of the prime movers in breaking the German's Enigma enciphering machine and helping to shorten the war in Europe by as much as a year (by some estimates).
The English guarded their secret ace in the hole, their codebreaking success against the Germans, as closely as the Americans guarded their success with the Japanese codes.
Even after the war. To the extent that when Gordon Welchman wrote a book in the early 1980s about his experiences and role in the Bletchley Park operation, the English attempted to charge him under the Secrets Act. The book was ultimately published in the United States.
Now, Alan Turing just happened to be homosexual. And the paranoid English government was so frightened by the prospect that his occasional sexual encounters at home or abroad might somehow compromise him and thus the secrecy of their codebreaking effort during the war that it hounded him to the point that he committed suicide in the early 1950s.
But for Alan Turing, who described a theoretical computer (now referred to as a Turing machine) and who worked during and after the war towards the development of a working general purpose computer, none of us might be posting here...
No, he mailed them from prison.