Why mathematicians hate Good Will Hunting(scientificamerican.com)
scientificamerican.com
Why mathematicians hate Good Will Hunting
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-mathematicians-hate-good-will-hunting/
7 comments
The article is well written but its title is a click bait. Although the film portrays mathematicians in a negative way and the allegedly hard problem on the blackboard is actually an easy homework exercise that every decent first-year student is able to solve, I don’t think the film has ever gathered any hatred among mathematicians.
Correct, most mathematicians, at least the ones I know, do not actually spend time thinking about Good Will Hunting, but it's the kind of stuff that science writers eat up.
If you want to know a movie that I actually heard mathematicians discussing, it would be "A Beautiful Mind", and then only because some people were complaining about how the minor characters misrepresented the mathematicians and especially how the Princeton Math department was unfairly caricatured in order to create dramatic tension (you need an antagonist, after all).
In reality Nash was treated with incredible generosity and kindness, and was given extreme affordances. For example, he visited Nirenberg at Courant and gave him a stack of hundreds of pages of dense, hand written notes that were the proof of the embedding theorem, and Nirenberg took enormous time to go through it and try to understand what Nash did, and then championed the proof. With no renumeration or credit, just as a professional courtesy and desire to see if the proof is correct. Nash was not easy to work with, but because so many people were willing to devote time to reviewing and correcting the proof -- which took 5 years -- it was eventually published. Moser, Gromov, Chern, and Kuiper all played a massive role, donating huge amounts of their personal time in order to help Nash.
But, as is usually the case with real life, it doesn't make for a good 2 hour dramatic story. It's a shame, because the real story is a great story.
If you want to know a movie that I actually heard mathematicians discussing, it would be "A Beautiful Mind", and then only because some people were complaining about how the minor characters misrepresented the mathematicians and especially how the Princeton Math department was unfairly caricatured in order to create dramatic tension (you need an antagonist, after all).
In reality Nash was treated with incredible generosity and kindness, and was given extreme affordances. For example, he visited Nirenberg at Courant and gave him a stack of hundreds of pages of dense, hand written notes that were the proof of the embedding theorem, and Nirenberg took enormous time to go through it and try to understand what Nash did, and then championed the proof. With no renumeration or credit, just as a professional courtesy and desire to see if the proof is correct. Nash was not easy to work with, but because so many people were willing to devote time to reviewing and correcting the proof -- which took 5 years -- it was eventually published. Moser, Gromov, Chern, and Kuiper all played a massive role, donating huge amounts of their personal time in order to help Nash.
But, as is usually the case with real life, it doesn't make for a good 2 hour dramatic story. It's a shame, because the real story is a great story.
I saw it as a sort of science-fiction - imagine living in a world where the smartest intellectuals all struggled to solve basic exercises about graph theory. Really imagine living in such a world - would you not feel frustrated when you tried to explain this basic concept to these supposed experts and they just didn't get it? The main character must have felt like he was going crazy!
Frankly, if anything, therapists hate it.
Source: my mom is a therapist who hates it.
Source: my mom is a therapist who hates it.
The author of the blog post has missed the point that Robbie Williams is trying to make in the movie. Its not about math. Math part of the movie is irrelevant. Also its not about someone hiding a talent and getting found, that's a prop too.
Its actually about a person who has been abused all his life finally allowing himself to love himself and allowing others to love him.
Its actually about a person who has been abused all his life finally allowing himself to love himself and allowing others to love him.
It's not about trauma.
It's apples. "How do you like them apples" That's the whole movie.
Will likes apples. Sean likes apples. That connection is the whole movie. Two guys who finally found someone else who gets it, who really gets apples. I cried.
It's apples. "How do you like them apples" That's the whole movie.
Will likes apples. Sean likes apples. That connection is the whole movie. Two guys who finally found someone else who gets it, who really gets apples. I cried.