The Mathematical Writings of Theodore Kaczynski

In this thread, I'm going to reproduce and dump the mathematical writings of Theodore Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber, several of which are readily available on the internet or at the local college library. Kaczynski is a controversial topic, and a "meme", but Veeky Forums is not above the discussion of board-specific memes, and so I dump the material.

My initial impression by scanning the writings, which range throughout the latter part of the 1960s, is that Kaczynski is a /pretty-good/ mathematician, but not brilliant. I would hope that this thread results in a discussion of the content of the mathematics itself, though it starts with a "sexy/controversial" subject.

Writings to follow, in an organized image file dump format. Get 'em while they're hot!

The motivational web page for this thread is

homepages.rpi.edu/~bulloj/tjk/tjk.html

which lists nine publication items. Of these, I will reproduce seven of nine ITT, not including Kaczynski's doctoral dissertation itself, nor the item published in the "J. Math. and Mech.", which has an ambiguous abbreviated title which I have not yet discovered in full, and moreover upon cursory searches seems to link articles due to Kaczynski's mentors/teachers.

I will begin immediately by dumping the few pages from the American Mathematical Monthly, which I've copied off at a local uni and transcribed. I include one explanatory note about these items.

Other urls found in this thread:

homepages.rpi.edu/~bulloj/tjk/tjk2.html
ams.org/journals/proc/1969-023-02/S0002-9939-1969-0248339-X/S0002-9939-1969-0248339-X.pdf
ams.org/journals/tran/1969-137-00/S0002-9947-1969-0236393-5/S0002-9947-1969-0236393-5.pdf
ams.org/journals/tran/1969-141-00/S0002-9947-1969-0243078-8/S0002-9947-1969-0243078-8.pdf
projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.mmj/1031732782
iumj.indiana.edu/IUMJ/FULLTEXT/1965/14/14039
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_University_Mathematics_Journal
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Nice.

An explanatory note (me) concerning the early AMM output, which I could not find online, and went to the local library to copy/transcribe. Kaczynski follows immediately.

Here, Kaczynski prepares an alternate proof of a particular algebraic theorem, using language which should be familiar to anons who have taken a modern/abstract algebra class.

The item is a bit like the Pythagorean theorem (and its many and varied well-documented proofs) in that Kaczynski acknowledges that several other proofs have come before, and yet he proceeds to offer his own.

Second of two pages of

This came up in one my classes a couple weeks ago, was surprised since I didn't know he ever worked on anything algebraic

A challenge problem, proposed by Kaczynski just a few pages away from the above. The answers and solutions would be published about a year later, reproducing Kaczynski's challenge problem itself (and citing him).

Kaczynski's youth together with the wide variety of credited solvers would seem to suggest the simplicity of the problem.

A solution and its solvers are published, now in 1965 as opposed to 1964.

This concludes Kaczynski's early output to the AMM, so far as I am aware of it.

The next stop is the Michigan Mathematical Journal, where UNABOM dropped this in 1966:

"On a Boundary Property of Continuous Funtions".

Historically speaking, we start to get a sense of Kaczynski moving about the country a bit, Gitting Gud (mathematically) as it were. There is a particularly impressive chain of union and intersection operators in the paper, later on.

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Now we skip ahead a bit, after Kaczynski was awarded his PhD around 1967, into the later writings of 1969 which were published in two journals of the American Mathematical Association. And this because they form a contiguous block of writing which we are able to faithfully reproduce (like the AMM stuff earlier), leaving the ambiguity for last.

First, we have "Boundary Functions for Bounded Harmonic Functions", a shorter item to be followed immediately by Kaczynski's longest mathematical publication of which I am presently aware (just shy of 20 pages), outside perhaps of his dissertation. Both of these seem to be variations on the theme of his recent dissertation, "Boundary Functions", and his highest level mathematical output.

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Next immediately follows the longest paper.

The long post-doc paper, "BOUNDARY FUNCTIONS AND SETS OF CURVILINEAR CONVERGENCE FOR CONTINUOUS FUNCTIONS", with extra-spicy title to match. Here we have Kaczynski at the height of his mathematical powers, dealing in what appears to be very autistic detail with matters pertinent to analysis both complex and real.

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A later, and immediately following item, plays with similar ideas, and makes intimations toward topology.

"THE SET OF CURVILINEAR CONVERGENCE OF A CONTINUOUS FUNCTION DEFINED IN THE INTERIOR OF A CUBE"

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What's happened thus far ITT, therefore, is that we have reproduced seven of the nine mathematical items attributed to Theodore Kaczynski per the link in the OP.

The two items there cited which have not been reproduced ITT thus far are Kaczynski's doctoral dissertation itself, the 1967 /Boundary Functions/, which clearly motivates the later work, and the /Boundary functions for functions defined in a disk/, which is expanded upon here homepages.rpi.edu/~bulloj/tjk/tjk2.html , has a journal citation at the link which is not immediately clear to the OP, and moreover seems to have a confusion with a very-similarly-titled item which had been published by Kaczynski's teachers. Thus the OP is at an impasse, but shall attempt to discover these two items in order to complete the object of the thread, or at least encourage other anons to do so.

For "American Mathematical Association" read "American Mathematical Society". This is my goof.

Also note that Kaczynski cites himself here , here and here , referring to the papers posted and mentioned ITT in an internally consistent fashion. In particular, Kaczynski cites the two items which have not been reproduced ITT thus far. Notice especially that "Boundary functions for functions defined in a disk" confusingly is the exact same title used in a distinct article prepared by Kaczynski's teacher and a collaborator, which is established in the former link-back.

Pic related is a rearrangement of the bibliography given in the OP link.

Free, active links for the four longer items posted ITT which I had not typeset myself:

Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, 1969. The Set of Curvlinear Convergence of a Continuous Function Defined in the Interior of a Cube.

ams.org/journals/proc/1969-023-02/S0002-9939-1969-0248339-X/S0002-9939-1969-0248339-X.pdf

Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, 1969. Boundary Functions for Bounded Harmonic Functions.

ams.org/journals/tran/1969-137-00/S0002-9947-1969-0236393-5/S0002-9947-1969-0236393-5.pdf

AND, Boundary Functions and Sets of Curvlinear Convergence for Continuous Functions.

ams.org/journals/tran/1969-141-00/S0002-9947-1969-0243078-8/S0002-9947-1969-0243078-8.pdf

Michigan Mathematical Journal, 1966. On a Boundary Property of Continuous Functions.

projecteuclid.org/download/pdf_1/euclid.mmj/1031732782

The eighth paper, the 1965 /Boundary Functions for Functions Defined in a Disk/ (not to be confused with the 1961 paper of the same name which had earlier been prepared by Kaczynski's teachers and collaborators), is freely available here:

iumj.indiana.edu/IUMJ/FULLTEXT/1965/14/14039

The slight difficulty which I'd had in finding this item is for multiple reasons. First, the abbreviated forms of the journal "J. Math. Mech.", etc, are not terribly illuminating. While people who know a bit about math culture in the USA are familiar with the AMS and the MAA, finding another journal with ambiguous abbreviations proved slightly tricky...

...especially given that the Journal no longer goes by that name. The journal's present name, and historical name changes, are helpfully explained here. Better yet, there is a link to a complete archive of the journal in all its namesakes, which of course contains Kaczynski's "eighth" (in my order of tracking them down) paper:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_University_Mathematics_Journal

Add to all of this that the paper shares a name with a closely related paper, which is the item that pops up first in a straightforward google search, and one can appreciate my day of confusion. Anyway.

I may not finish dumping the paper ITT before tonight, but now we all know where to find it. This means that only the dissertation itself is yet to be dug up, and we know where to go for that: University of Michican system, Ann Arbor.

It's interesting to note that Ted really did spend important time all around the country: growing up in the midwest (and publishing mathematical work in local journals), being a student out east, teaching out west, Manifesto'ing in Montana, and now Chilling in Colorado.

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We start seeing some odd, clumsy "squiggly" diagrams (Kaczynski's hand, or his collaborators'?)

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This completes the dump of the mathematical output of Theodore John Kaczynski, aka The Unabomber, with the exception of his doctoral dissertation, /Boundary Functions/, which I have yet to find, if it is available online.

Just one more bump on the off-chance that I can find the dissertation, and quite frankly I deserve and am entitled to at least one more (You) for all this.

I don't do math I just saw your post on Veeky Forums.

cheers lad.

It's actually interesting that there's been absolutely zero discussion ITT. Appreciating Kaczynski's early proof of Wedderburn's theorem seems like a fine starting point, though unrelated to the later (and much more massive) work in analysis.

Sure, have this (you). Keep in mind that you're posting on a board filled with high schoolers and freshmen.

Also, there doesn't seem to be anything that interesting in all those math papers. It seems weird to me to give this much attention to a terrorist, when some other autist from his times or even ours will never ever get a tenth of the attention on his mathematical work.

Yes, I think now that you're right in down-playing Kaczynski's actual ability and results, just an analyst puttering along. And of course you make a fair point: "why should the murderer get the attention?" To which I can only honestly reply...

Well... he was the big famous murderer...(who left behind this other stuff)!

I think I will work through the early Wedderburn note, personally.

I enjoyed this, thanks