US mathematician, anarchist theorist, and activist. Known as the Unabomber. Because the FBI's first targets were universities and airlines.
US mathematician, anarchist theorist, and activist Ted John Kaczynski, after resigning from his position as an assistant professor at the University of Berkeley, settled in Montana and started to live in a cabin in the forest, looking for ways to live completely on his own. However, the observation that industrial development narrowed his living space more and more and the nature around him was constantly being destroyed, led him to first small acts of sabotage and then to deliberate and planned bomb attacks.
Theodore John Kaczynski (born May 22, 1942), also known as the Unabomber, is an American domestic terrorist and former mathematics professor. He was a mathematics prodigy, but abandoned his academic career in 1969 to pursue a more primitive life.
Kaczynski was born in a suburb of Chicago in 1942. Between 1978 and 1995, he was involved in 16 separate bomb attacks, causing a total of 3 deaths and 23 injuries. The FBI, which was after him, started to call him the Unabomber, an abbreviation for "University and Airline Bomber" since universities and airlines were their first targets.
Little was known about Kaczynski until his arrest in 1996. He was spotted by someone while planting a bomb in 1987. A sketch of a sketch was made with the description of this person. Realizing that he had made a mistake, Kaczynski suspended his actions for 6 years and was thought to be dead. But in 1993 he resumed his attacks. The goals of the Unabomber were as follows; Northwestern University, American Airlines, University of Utah, Vanderbilt University, University of California, The Boing Company, University of Michigan, computer store in Sacramento, computer store in Salt Lake City, geneticist Charles Epstein, Yale University, advertiser Thomas J Mosser and lumber industry lobbyist Gilbert Brent Murray. Kaczynski's trial, which caused permanent damage to many of his victims and killed three people, was concluded in 1998, two years after he was caught in 1996, and was sentenced to eight life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Even when Kaczynski was a student, he was known as the weirdo. He was a genius. He was accepted to Harvard University at the age of 16. Kaczynski, who started as a faculty member at the University of Berkeley in 1967 at the age of 25, made history as the "youngest faculty member" ever. Peter Duren, Kazcynski's professor at the University of Michigan, described him as: "He was extraordinary. He was unlike any other doctoral student.”
Kaczynski's students made many complaints about him. According to students, Kaczynski was shy in class, often incomprehensible, and constantly neglected students who needed help during office hours. After resigning from his job, he was learning to live on his own in his Montana house until 1978, while he was saving money to make bombs without anyone knowing.
In 1995, he wrote a manifesto titled "Industrial Society and Its Future". He sent it to the Washington Post and New York Times with the promise of stopping the bombings if it was published, and he managed to get it published.
After his manifesto was published in the New York Times and Washington Post, Kaczynski's brother David read the manifesto at his wife's insistence and discovered that it had great similarities with some of the texts Ted Kaczynski had sent to newspapers in his youth. He first conducted his own investigation through a private investigator and then informed the FBI of the situation. Although the lawyer appointed for Ted Kaczynski, who was detained in his hut, first wanted to defend that his client was mentally ill, Kaczynski opposed this. Despite this, a committee of appointed psychologists and psychiatrists diagnosed Kaczynski with paranoid schizophrenia, but those who kept Kaczynski under observation in prison for four years insisted that he did not have a mental disorder. After a controversial court process, Kaczynski was sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole. Kaczynski, who is currently living in prison, continues to publish articles in some magazines from time to time.
There are people who see and admire Ted Kaczynski as an anti-hero, not a terrorist. In fact, in 1996, during the US presidential election by his political followers, "Unabomber for President!" A political campaign was even launched.
His life story, told in the 1996 documentary Unabomber: The True Story, was the subject of a German film in 2003 and a play in Bulgaria in 2011. The 2017 Netflix production of Manhunt is also adapted from the story of Ted Kaczynski.