Age, Biography, and Wiki
Ted Kaczynski was born on May 22, 1942, to Theodore R. Kaczynski and Wanda Dombek. He grew up in Illinois and demonstrated exceptional mathematical abilities from an early age. Kaczynski entered Harvard University at 16 and later earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan. However, he abandoned academia to live a reclusive life, during which he carried out a series of bombings that ultimately led to his arrest in 1996.
| Occupation | Environmentalist |
|---|---|
| Date of Birth | 22 May 1942 |
| Age | 83 Years |
| Birth Place | Chicago, Illinois, U.S. |
| Horoscope | Gemini |
| Country | U.S |
| Date of death | 10 June, 2023 |
| Died Place | Durham, North Carolina, U.S. |
Height, Weight & Measurements
There is limited information available about Ted Kaczynski's physical measurements such as height and weight. His focus was more on intellectual pursuits and his radical ideology rather than physical attributes.
In late 1985, a nail-and-splinter-loaded bomb in the parking lot of a computer store in Sacramento, California, killed the 38-year-old owner of the store, Hugh Scrutton. On February 20, 1987, a bomb disguised as a piece of lumber injured Gary Wright in the parking lot of a computer store in Salt Lake City, Utah; nerves in Wright's left arm were severed, and at least 200 pieces of shrapnel entered his body. Kaczynski was spotted while planting the Salt Lake City bomb. This led to a widely distributed sketch of the suspect as a hooded man with a mustache and aviator sunglasses.
At 12:23 a.m. on June 10, 2023, Kaczynski was found in his cell unresponsive with no pulse after hanging himself from a handicap rail with a shoelace. Prison employees immediately began resuscitation measures, including chest compressions. He was taken to Duke University Hospital in Durham, North Carolina, where his blood pressure remained low until he was pronounced dead at 8:07 A.M. EDT.
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Dating & Relationship Status
Kaczynski lived a largely isolated life, avoiding mainstream society and relationships. His focus was on his anti-technology manifesto and his actions as the Unabomber, which overshadowed any personal relationships.
Neighbors in Evergreen Park later described the Kaczynski family as "civic-minded folks", one recalling the parents "sacrificed everything they had for their children". Both Ted and David were intelligent, but Ted was exceptionally bright. Neighbors described him as a smart but lonely individual.
After resigning from Berkeley, Kaczynski moved to his parents' home in Lombard, Illinois. Two years later, in 1971, he moved to a remote cabin he had built outside Lincoln, Montana, where he could live a simple life with little money and without electricity or running water, working odd jobs and receiving significant financial support from his family. Kaczynski's original goal was to become self-sufficient so he could live autonomously. He used an old bicycle to get to town, and a volunteer at the local library said he visited frequently to read classic works in their original languages. Other Lincoln residents said later that such a lifestyle was typical in the area. Kaczynski's cabin was described by a census taker in the 1990 census as containing a bed, two chairs, storage trunks, a gas stove, and lots of books.
Kaczynski was visited multiple times in Montana by his father, who was impressed by Ted's wilderness skills. Kaczynski's father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 1990 and held a family meeting without Kaczynski later that year to map out their future. On October 2, 1990, Kaczynski's father shot and killed himself in his home.
Kaczynski's first mail bomb was directed at Buckley Crist, a professor of materials engineering at Northwestern University. On May 25, 1978, a package bearing Crist's return address was found in a parking lot at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The package was "returned" to Crist, who was suspicious because he had not sent it, so he contacted campus police. Officer Terry Marker opened the package, which exploded and caused minor injuries. Kaczynski had returned to Chicago for the May 1978 bombing and stayed there for a time to work with his father and brother at a foam rubber factory. In August 1978, his brother fired him for writing insulting limericks about a female supervisor Ted had courted briefly. The supervisor later recalled Kaczynski as intelligent and quiet but remembered little of their acquaintanceship and firmly denied they had had any romantic relationship. Kaczynski's second bomb was sent nearly one year after the first one, again to Northwestern University. The bomb, concealed inside a cigar box and left on a table, caused minor injuries to graduate student John Harris when he opened it.
Before the publication of Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski's brother, David, was encouraged by his wife to follow up on suspicions that Ted was the Unabomber. David was dismissive at first, but he took the likelihood more seriously after reading the manifesto a week after it was published in September 1995. He searched through old family papers and found letters dating to the 1970s that Ted had sent to newspapers to protest the abuses of technology using phrasing similar to that in the manifesto.
Before the manifesto's publication, the FBI held many press conferences asking the public to help identify the Unabomber. They were convinced that the bomber was from the Chicago area where he began his bombings, had worked in or had some connection to Salt Lake City, and by the 1990s had some association with the San Francisco Bay Area. This geographical information and the wording in excerpts from the manifesto that were released before the entire text of the manifesto was published persuaded David's wife to urge him to read it.
Kaczynski's brother, David, had tried to remain anonymous, but he was soon identified. Within a few days, an FBI agent team was dispatched to interview David and his wife with their attorney in Washington, D.C. At this and subsequent meetings, David provided letters written by his brother in their original envelopes, allowing the FBI task force to use the postmark dates to add more detail to their timeline of Ted's activities.
Forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz said Kaczynski was not psychotic, but had a schizoid or schizotypal personality disorder. In his 2010 book Technological Slavery, Kaczynski said that two prison psychologists who visited him frequently for four years told him they saw no indication that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and the diagnosis was "ridiculous" and a "political diagnosis". Some contemporary authors suggest that people (notably Kaczynski's brother and mother) purposely spread the image of Kaczynski as mentally ill intending to save his life.
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Net Worth and Salary
As of 2023, Ted Kaczynski's net worth was estimated to be around $2 million. His wealth was largely derived from the sale of items from his cabin, which were auctioned off to raise funds for restitution to his victims.
Career, Business, and Investments
Kaczynski's career began as a promising mathematician. He became an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, at the age of 25. However, he resigned from academia in 1969 and moved to a remote cabin in Montana, where he adopted a primitive lifestyle. His actions as the Unabomber overshadowed his academic achievements, and he was eventually arrested in 1996.
Theodore John Kaczynski (May 22, 1942 – June 10, 2023), also known as the Unabomber, was an American mathematician and domestic terrorist. He was a mathematics prodigy, but abandoned his academic career in 1969 to pursue a reclusive primitive lifestyle and lone wolf terrorism campaign to further his political agenda.
In 1971, Kaczynski moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water near Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills to become self-sufficient. After witnessing the destruction of the wilderness surrounding his cabin, he concluded that living in nature was becoming impossible and resolved to fight industrialization and its destruction of nature through terrorism. In 1979, Kaczynski became the subject of what was, by the time of his arrest in 1996, the longest and most expensive investigation in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The FBI used the case identifier UNABOM (University and Airline Bomber) before his identity was known, resulting in the media naming him the "Unabomber".
In 1967, Kaczynski's dissertation, Boundary Functions, won the Sumner B. Myers Prize for Michigan's best mathematics dissertation of the year. Allen Shields, his doctoral advisor, called it "the best I have ever directed", and Maxwell Reade, a member of his dissertation committee, said, "I would guess that maybe 10 or 12 men in the country understood or appreciated it." In late 1967, the 25-year-old Kaczynski became an acting assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught mathematics. He assumed the position of the youngest assistant professor in the history of the university. By September 1968, Kaczynski was formally appointed to an assistant professorship, a sign that he was on track for tenure. His teaching evaluations suggested he was not well-liked by his students—he seemed uncomfortable teaching, taught straight from the textbook, and refused to answer questions.
Kaczynski's next two bombs targeted people at the University of California, Berkeley. The first, in July 1982, caused serious injuries to engineering professor Diogenes Angelakos. Nearly three years later, in May 1985, John Hauser, a graduate student and captain in the United States Air Force, lost four fingers and the vision in one eye. Kaczynski handcrafted the bomb from wooden parts. A bomb sent to the Boeing Company in Auburn, Washington, was defused by a bomb squad the following month. In November 1985, professor James V. McConnell and research assistant Nicklaus Suino were both severely injured after Suino opened a mail bomb addressed to McConnell.
In 1994, Burson-Marsteller executive Thomas J. Mosser was killed after opening a mail bomb sent to his home in New Jersey. In a letter to The New York Times, Kaczynski wrote he had sent the bomb because of Mosser's work repairing the public image of Exxon after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. This was followed by the 1995 murder of Gilbert Brent Murray, president of the timber industry lobbying group California Forestry Association, by a mail bomb addressed to previous president William Dennison, who had retired. Geneticist Phillip Sharp at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology received a threatening letter shortly afterward.
In October 2005, Kaczynski offered to donate two rare books to the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies at Northwestern University's campus in Evanston, Illinois, the location of his first two attacks. The library rejected the offer because it already had copies of the works. The Labadie Collection, part of the University of Michigan's Special Collections Library, houses Kaczynski's correspondence with over 400 people since his arrest, including replies, legal documents, publications, and clippings in their own sub-collection titled, "Ted Kaczynski Papers, 1996–2014 (majority within 1996–2005)". His writings are among the most popular selections in the University of Michigan's special collections. The identity of most correspondents will remain sealed until 2049. In 2012, Kaczynski responded to the Harvard Alumni Association's directory inquiry for the fiftieth reunion of the class of 1962; he listed his occupation as "prisoner" and eight life sentences as "awards."
In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999), futurist Ray Kurzweil quoted a passage from Kaczynski's manifesto Industrial Society and Its Future. Kaczynski was referenced by Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, in the 2000 Wired article "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us". Joy stated that Kaczynski "is clearly a Luddite, but simply saying this does not dismiss his argument". Professor Jean-Marie Apostolidès has raised questions surrounding the ethics of spreading Kaczynski's views. Various radical movements and extremists have been influenced by Kaczynski. People inspired by Kaczynski's ideas show up in unexpected places, from nihilist, anarchist, and eco-extremist movements to conservative intellectuals. Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks, published a manifesto which copied large portions from Industrial Society and Its Future, with certain terms substituted (e.g., replacing "leftists" with "cultural Marxists" and "multiculturalists").
Social Network
Ted Kaczynski did not engage in social media or public interactions. His life was marked by isolation and a rejection of modern technology, aligning with his anti-technology beliefs.
In 1995, Kaczynski sent a letter to The New York Times promising to "desist from terrorism" if the Times or The Washington Post published his manifesto, in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary in attracting attention to the erosion of human freedom and dignity by modern technologies. The FBI and U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno pushed for the publication of the essay, which appeared in The Washington Post in September 1995. Upon reading it, Kaczynski's brother, David, recognized the prose style and reported his suspicions to the FBI. After his arrest in 1996, Kaczynski—maintaining that he was sane—tried and failed to dismiss his court-appointed lawyers because they wished him to plead insanity to avoid the death penalty. He pleaded guilty to all charges in 1998 and was sentenced to several consecutive life terms in prison without the possibility of parole. In 2021, he received a cancer diagnosis and stopped treatment in March 2023. Kaczynski hanged himself in prison in June 2023.
Kaczynski attended Evergreen Park Community High School, where he excelled academically. He played the trombone in the marching band and was a member of the mathematics, biology, coin, and German clubs. In 1996, a former classmate said: "He was never really seen as a person, as an individual personality... He was always regarded as a walking brain, so to speak." During this period, Kaczynski became intensely interested in mathematics, spending hours studying and solving advanced problems. He became associated with a group of like-minded boys interested in science and mathematics, known as the "briefcase boys" due to their penchant for carrying briefcases.
In 1962, Kaczynski enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he earned his master's and doctoral degrees in mathematics in 1964 and 1967, respectively. Michigan was not his first choice for postgraduate education; he had applied to the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago, both of which accepted him but offered him no teaching position or financial aid. Michigan offered him an annual grant of $2,310 and a teaching post.
At Michigan, Kaczynski specialized in complex analysis, specifically geometric function theory. Professor Peter Duren said of Kaczynski, "He was an unusual person. He was not like the other graduate students. He was much more focused about his work. He had a drive to discover mathematical truth." George Piranian, another of his Michigan mathematics professors, said, "It is not enough to say he was smart." Piranian taught Kaczynski function theory and recalled, "he was very persistent in his work. If a problem was hard, he worked harder. He was easily the top student, or one of the top". Professor Allen Shields wrote about Kaczynski in a grade evaluation that he was the "best man I have seen". Kaczynski received one F, five B's and twelve A's in his eighteen courses at the university. In 2006, he said he had unpleasant memories of Michigan and felt the university had low standards for grading, considering his relatively high grades.
For a period of several weeks in 1966, Kaczynski experienced intense sexual fantasies of being female and decided to undergo gender transition. He arranged to meet with a psychiatrist but changed his mind in the waiting room and discussed other things instead, without disclosing his original reason for making the appointment. Afterward, enraged, he considered killing the psychiatrist and other people whom he hated. Kaczynski described this episode as a "major turning point" in his life. He recalled: "I felt disgusted about what my uncontrolled sexual cravings had almost led me to do. And I felt humiliated, and I violently hated the psychiatrist. Just then there came a major turning point in my life. Like a Phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope."
"It's kind of rolling country, not flat, and when you get to the edge of it you find these ravines that cut very steeply in to cliff-like drop-offs and there was even a waterfall there. It was about a two days' hike from my cabin. That was the best spot until the summer of 1983. That summer there were too many people around my cabin so I decided I needed some peace. I went back to the plateau and when I got there I found they had put a road right through the middle of it... You just can't imagine how upset I was. It was from that point on I decided that, rather than trying to acquire further wilderness skills, I would work on getting back at the system. Revenge." During the 1980s and 1990s, Kaczynski's neighbors suspected him of attacking and poisoning their dogs on multiple occasions. After his arrest, the FBI found poisons in his cabin, and in later letters, he admitted to killing at least one dog.
In 1995, Kaczynski mailed several letters to media outlets outlining his goals and demanding a major newspaper print his 35,000-word essay Industrial Society and Its Future (dubbed the "Unabomber manifesto" by the FBI) verbatim. He stated he would "desist from terrorism" if this demand was met. There was controversy as to whether the essay should be published, but Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh recommended its publication out of concern for public safety and in the hope that a reader could identify the author. Bob Guccione of Penthouse volunteered to publish it. Kaczynski replied Penthouse was less "respectable" than The New York Times and The Washington Post, and said that, "to increase our chances of getting our stuff published in some 'respectable' periodical", he would "reserve the right to plant one (and only one) bomb intended to kill, after our manuscript has been published" if Penthouse published the document instead of The Times or The Post. The Washington Post published the essay on September 19, 1995.
A significant portion of the document is dedicated to discussing political leftism as a manifestation of related psychological types, with Kaczynski attributing the prevalence and intensity of leftism in society as both a negative symptom of psychological pressures induced by technological conditions as well as an obstacle to the formation of an effective anti-tech revolution. He defined leftists as "mainly socialists, collectivists, 'politically correct' types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like". He believed that over-socialization and feelings of inferiority are primary drivers of leftism, and derided it as "one of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world". Kaczynski added that the type of movement he envisioned must be anti-leftist and refrain from collaboration with leftists as, in his view, "leftism is in the long run inconsistent with wild nature, with human freedom and with the elimination of modern technology".
James Q. Wilson, in a 1998 New York Times op-ed, wrote: "If it is the work of a madman, then the writings of many political philosophers—Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Paine, Karl Marx—are scarcely more sane." He added: "The Unabomber does not like socialization, technology, leftist political causes or conservative attitudes. Apart from his call for an (unspecified) revolution, his paper resembles something that a very good graduate student might have written."
In 1980, chief agent John Douglas, working with agents in the FBI's Behavioral Sciences Unit, issued a psychological profile of the unidentified bomber. It described the offender as a man with above-average intelligence and connections to academia. This profile was later refined to characterize the offender as a neo-Luddite holding an academic degree in the hard sciences, but this psychologically-based profile was discarded in 1983. FBI analysts developed an alternative theory that concentrated on the physical evidence in recovered bomb fragments. In this rival profile, the suspect was characterized as a blue-collar airplane mechanic. The UNABOM Task Force set up a toll-free telephone hotline to take calls related to the investigation, with a $1 million (equivalent to approximately $ million in ) reward for anyone who could provide information leading to the Unabomber's capture.
David had once admired and emulated his older brother but had since left the survivalist lifestyle behind. He had received assurances from the FBI that he would remain anonymous and that his brother would not learn who had turned him in, but his identity was leaked to CBS News in early April 1996. CBS anchorman Dan Rather called FBI director Louis Freeh, who requested 24 hours before CBS broke the story on the evening news. The FBI scrambled to finish the search warrant and have it issued by a federal judge in Montana; afterward, the FBI conducted an internal leak investigation, but the source of the leak was never identified.
Almost immediately after being convicted, Kaczynski began serving his life sentences without the possibility of parole at ADX Florence, a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado. Early in his imprisonment, Kaczynski befriended Ramzi Yousef and Timothy McVeigh, the perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, respectively; they discussed religion and politics and formed a friendship which lasted until McVeigh's execution in 2001. Kaczynski stated about Timothy McVeigh: "On a personal level I like McVeigh and I imagine that most people would like him," but also stated, "assuming that the Oklahoma City bombing was intended as a protest against the U.S. government in general and against the government's actions at Waco in particular, I will say that I think the bombing was a bad action because it was unnecessarily inhumane."
Kaczynski has been portrayed in and inspired artistic works in popular culture. These include the 1996 television film Unabomber: The True Story, the 2011 play P.O. Box Unabomber, the 2012 documentary Stemple Pass, Manhunt: Unabomber, the 2017 season of the television series Manhunt, the 2020 miniseries Unabomber: In His Own Words and the 2021 film Ted K. He was portrayed by Sharlto Copley and Paul Bettany in Ted K and Manhunt respectively. The moniker "Unabomber" was also applied to the Italian Unabomber, a terrorist who conducted attacks similar to Kaczynski's in Italy from 1994 to 2006. Prior to the 1996 United States presidential election, a campaign called "Unabomber for President" was launched with the goal of electing Kaczynski as president through write-in votes.
Education
Kaczynski was highly educated, attending Harvard University at 16 and later earning his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Michigan. His academic achievements were significant, but his later actions overshadowed these accomplishments.
Ted Kaczynski passed away in 2023, leaving behind a complex legacy of intellect and violence. His story serves as a contrast between exceptional academic potential and radical ideology.
From first to fourth grade (ages six to nine), Kaczynski attended Sherman Elementary School in Chicago, where administrators described him as healthy and well-adjusted. After testing scored his IQ at 167, he skipped the sixth grade. Kaczynski later described this as a pivotal event: previously he had socialized with his peers and was even seen as a leader, but after skipping ahead of them he felt he did not fit in with the older children, who bullied him.
Throughout high school, Kaczynski was ahead of his classmates academically. Placed in a more advanced mathematics class, he soon mastered the material. He skipped the eleventh grade, and, by attending summer school, he graduated at age 15. Kaczynski was one of his school's five National Merit finalists and was encouraged to apply to Harvard University. While still at age 15, he was accepted to Harvard and entered the university on a scholarship in 1958 at age 16. A high school classmate later said Kaczynski was emotionally unprepared: "They packed him up and sent him to Harvard before he was ready... He didn't even have a driver's license."
Kaczynski matriculated at Harvard College as a mathematics prodigy. During his first year at the university, Kaczynski lived at 8 Prescott Street, which was intended to provide a small, intimate living space for the youngest, most precocious incoming students. For the following three years, he lived at Eliot House. His housemates and other students at Harvard described Kaczynski as a very intelligent but socially reserved person. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics from Harvard in 1962, finishing with a GPA of 3.12.
In his second year at Harvard, Kaczynski participated in a study led by Harvard psychologist Henry Murray. Subjects were told they would debate personal philosophy with a fellow student and were asked to write essays detailing their personal beliefs and aspirations. The essays were given to an anonymous individual who would confront and belittle the subject in what Murray himself called "vehement, sweeping, and personally abusive" attacks, using the content of the essays as ammunition. Kaczynski spent 200 hours as part of the study.
Kaczynski's lawyers later attributed his hostility towards mind control techniques to his participation in Murray's study. Kaczynski stated he resented Murray and his co-workers, primarily because of the invasion of his privacy he perceived as a result of their experiments. Nevertheless, he said he was "quite confident that [his] experiences with Professor Murray had no significant effect on the course of [his] life".
In 1981, a package bearing the return address of a Brigham Young University professor of electrical engineering, LeRoy Wood Bearnson, was discovered in a hallway at the University of Utah. It was brought to the campus police and was defused by a bomb squad. The following May, a bomb was sent to Patrick C. Fischer, a professor of computer science at Vanderbilt University. The package exploded when Fischer's secretary, Janet Smith, opened it, and Smith received injuries to her face and arms.
In 1993, after a six-year break, Kaczynski mailed a bomb to the home of Charles Epstein from the University of California, San Francisco. Epstein lost several fingers upon opening the package. On the same weekend, Kaczynski mailed a bomb to David Gelernter, a computer science professor at Yale University. Gelernter lost sight in one eye, hearing in one ear, and a portion of his right hand.
Alston Chase, a fellow alumnus at Harvard University, wrote in 2000 for The Atlantic that "it is true that many believed Kaczynski was insane because they needed to believe it. But the truly disturbing aspect of Kaczynski and his ideas is not that they are so foreign but that they are so familiar." He argued: "We need to see Kaczynski as exceptional—madman or genius—because the alternative is so much more frightening."
University of Michigan–Dearborn philosophy professor David Skrbina wrote the introduction to Kaczynski's 2010 anthology Technological Slavery, which includes the original manifesto, letters from Kaczynski to Skrbina, and other essays. Two further editions have been published since 2010, one in 2019 and another in 2022. Kaczynski also wrote a second book in 2016 titled, Anti-Tech Revolution: Why and How, that does not include the manifesto, but delves deeply into an analysis of why technological society cannot be reformed and the dynamics of revolutionary movements.
According to a 2021 study, Kaczynski's manifesto "is a synthesis of ideas from three well-known academics: French philosopher Jacques Ellul, British zoologist Desmond Morris, and American psychologist Martin Seligman".
Because of the material used to make the mail bombs, U.S. postal inspectors, who initially had responsibility for the case, labeled the suspect the "Junkyard Bomber". FBI Inspector Terry D. Turchie was appointed to run the UNABOM (University and Airline Bomber) investigation. In 1979, an FBI-led task force that included 125 agents from the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service was formed. The task force grew to more than 150 full-time personnel, but minute analysis of recovered components of the bombs and the investigation into the lives of the victims proved of little use in identifying the suspect, who built the bombs primarily from scrap materials available almost anywhere. Investigators later learned that the victims were chosen indiscriminately from library research.
