The Unabomber’s One Tiny Oversight

Ted Kaczynski.

He’s infamously known as the Unabomber. He led the longest and most expensive investigation in the history of the Federal Bureau. By all metric possible, he was nothing short of a genius. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Harvard. In 1962, he enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he earned a master’s and doctoral degree in mathematics in 1964 and 1967.

Maxwell Reade, a member of his dissertation committee, concluded that “maybe 10 or 12 people in the country understood” Kaczynski’s dissertation. Allen Shields, Kaczynski’s doctoral advisor, called Kaczynski’s work the “best he has ever directed.”

He was the youngest assistant professor of mathematics to ever teach in the history of University of California, Berkeley.

And then, on June 30, 1969, Ted resigned.

Following his resignation, he built a remote cabin outside Lincoln, Montana. He figured he could live a simple life with very little money and no electricity or running water. By 1978, he felt that it was not enough to isolate himself from society in nature. Self-sufficiency was not enough. He felt that technology was destroying the only thing he loved: nature.

He began building bombs. Here is a table of all the bombs the FBI believes he sent: