The Mathematician So Strange the FBI Thought He Was a Spy



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The Man who Loved Only Numbers (biography): https://amzn.to/4adsHSJ

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Editing by Noor Hanania
Co-written by Sarah Wells

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31 thoughts on “The Mathematician So Strange the FBI Thought He Was a Spy”

  1. It’s important for security agencies to have threats to follow. Otherwise why would they exist. This is why they often follow CEOs of mega businesses who seek to control governments, pulling strings in the background. Ironic comment!

    Reply
  2. I’ve never heard of this man in my life but I watched this video this evening and then a few hours later I started listening to an episode of comedy podcast from 3 years ago and a host brought him up. There are hundreds of episodes of this podcast that I’m listening to in order and I happened to be up to the one where the guy I just saw a video about is briefly mentioned??

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  3. While in college in the 1960s, I had a mathematics professor from Poland, I am by no means a mathematical person, but he was one of the most interesting people I dealt with in college. And yes he was a bit quirky.

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  4. Plot Twist Update: personal letters written by Erdos were recently discovered, showing him not only to be a spy, but to be a double-agent. This fact was so cleverly disguised that not even his spy handlers were aware at the time.

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  5. Never was really interested in Erdos. With some mathematicians I feel a 'mystical' connection to them. His big ego tended to steam roller over others ,but I don't know that much about him really. He was, I am told, a great genius and so that counts. Some people naturally attract you while others I find repellant. Oppenheimer was treated much worse by the American government.

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  6. That "I object to both Iron Curtains, both Joe's (USSR) and Sam's (USA)." quote is so badass, and demonstrates perfectly what kind of person this man was: he held no illusions, no mental allegiances, he saw things from a big-picture perspective and was as close as is humanly possible to being sincerely objective: in other words, a mental hero, to uphold that perspective throughout the whole Cold War culture of propaganda as not merely as the desperate yell for help during wartime, but as a permanent fixture of American life, and ultimately over time and generations, as the normalized reality and "history" that the vast majority believe without question; and with any attempts to talk about real history met with violent paroxysms of reactionary hatred towards sincere intellectual inquiry (aka, "woke woke woke woke woke").

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