Ted Kaczynski Keeps Popping Up

In what is possibly yet another illustration of the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, I've been running into Ted Kaczynski, also known as the Unabomber, multiple times recently.

If you are one of today'slucky 10.000 who didn't know of him already, here is a rundown: He was a gifted mathematician on the tenure track, then he suddenly quit not only his job but also the company of other human beings and chose to live as a semi-recluse in a very rural area¹1: The similarity with Grothendieck is striking. . Finally, he went on a decade and a half long mail-bombing spree, killing three people and injuring twenty three others. He was captured in the mid-90s and died in prison in 2023.

I knew about him already, but the first time I met him again was in this email on TUHS mailing list from Doug McIlroy, about Dennis Ritchie, the co-inventor of UNIX and C, a Turing-Award recipient, that is to say, quite a famous person in his own right:

Dennis told [Nils-Peter Nelson] he was going to a class reunion at Harvard.

[Nils-Peter Nelson]: "I guess you're the most famous member of your class."

[Dennis]: "No, the Unabomber is.

A bit later, I was researching academic humour for my essay on how to cite. Ted appeared on the front page of a mathematics paper:

Two years later T.J. Kaczynski[…]'s elegant proof showed[…]

– Pudwell (2007)²2: (Pudwell, Lara. 2007. “Digit Reversal without Apology.” Mathematics Magazine 80 (2): 129–32. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27643011.)

With a footnote over his name that reads "Better known for other work".

Later again, I needed some references on MKUltra, one of the CIA's human experimentation program, and read that he was a victim of it. These claims are however, to quote Ted Kaczynski himself, "all bullshit".

And finally, I was reworking my course on "State, Administration, Technology", by reading on Jacques Ellul. I learned that Kaczynski also read Ellul when he was writing his manifesto.

I'm only halfway through Grothendieck's Récoltes et Semailles, but I think I need to read Kaczynski's work after that. There is something fascinating about smart and successful people going suddenly haywire and taking a wild, wild turn in their life.

These people are portrayed as mentally ill ("paranoid", "scyzophrenic"), which is an easy way to dismiss their ideas.

The media have done a remarkable job over the last 25 years of uniformly presenting Ted Kaczynski as a deranged sicko primarily motivated by personal derangement rather than any rational political or ideological goal.

– Alex Uziel https://www.thetedkarchive.com/library/alex-uziel-ted-kaczynski-debunking-the-ted-kaczynski-mk-ultra-myth

But when I read Grothendieck, I'm reminded of

[…]I am paranoid, but me being paranoid does not preclude all of them having it in for me. – Pierre Desproges https://archive.org/details/vivonsheureuxena0000desp/page/182/mode/2up?q=paranoiaque

Grothendieck may have gone off the deep end, but he had a point, and his colleague really did him dirty. I suspect Kaczynski too had a point, and I need to read his works now.

For the record, I don't condone mailing pipe bombs. The fact that Kaczynski's bombs maimed innocent bystanders (e.g. a campus cop, a secretary) removes any chance of his methods being justified. But the reasoning behind his actions is still interesting.