"Stick it to the man!" Mathematical discoveries that resulted in persecution. As the old story goes, Pythagoras and his followers were adamant that all numbers were rational, until Hippasus came along and proved that $\sqrt{2}$ (the length of the diagonal of the unit square) is irrational. A lot of Pythagoras' work was thrown into question, and as a result, he sentenced Hippasus to be drowned. Now, I'm dubious of the reliability of this story (it varies from source to source), but I _am_ interested in whether there are more cases of a mathematician being persecuted (punished in some way) by "the man" for making a radical discovery/proof. Are there any such examples? If there are, please state the discovery (the actual mathematical statement) along with the punishment. **Edit** I'm looking for examples of persecution **solely due to the discovery** (not anything to do with the race, relgion, orientation, etc. of the discover **er** )

Israel Gelfand discovered the tridiagonal matrix algorithm (or rather established its stability and applied to numerical solution of PDEs) in the early 50s . In view of the main applications of numerical analysis at that time the method - essentially an elementary linear algebra - was classified by the Soviet government services and Gelfand was forbidden to leave the country. Being a major mathematician of the epoch, he was therefore unable to participate in any conference abroad until (?) the late 70s.