The Mathematics of Ted Kaczynski

Left: Ted Kaczynski (1942-) while a lecturer at UC Berkeley (Photo: Wikimedia Commons). Right: Kaczynski’s 1969 paper “The set of curvilinear convergence of a continuous function defined in the interior of a cube”in the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society 23(2), pp. 323–327.

Before terrorist Theodore John Kaczynski (1942-) began sending mail-bombs to faculty members at various American universities, he had a promising career in mathematics. In particular, between 1964–69, he published a total of six single-authored research papers in renowned mathematical journals, including The American Mathematical Monthly and Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society.

The young Kaczynski did work in analysis, specifically geometric function theory in the narrow subfield of boundary values of continuous functions. The purpose of this article is to give an introduction to this work.

Education (1958–67)

Kaczynski grew up in Illinois, where he attended Sherman Elementary School and Ever…