I am referring, of course, to the new movie based on a play that I have meant to see (but still haven't seen) rather than the song by Paul Simon in which Steve Martin and Chevy Chase appear in the music video.
I enjoyed the film because it does a pretty good job of getting into the mind of a potentially crazy mathematician and of somebody who has to deal with one on a regular basis. In terms of my qualifications for making that statement, I've definitely been accused of being crazy more than a few times and I'm certainly a mathematician. :) Also, my doctoral advisor was nuts (though he's technically a theoretical physicist) and was obsessed with trying to prove Goldbach's conjecture (that every even integer greater than 2 can be written as the sum of two primes), which dates from a 1742 letter. My understanding was that the play version of Proof is about the Goldbach conjecture, but it's never mentioned by name in the movie---just that it's a really important problem in number theory, so based on the movie only, they could easily be referring to the Riemann hypothesis, and some of the fields they mention in the movie are ones I would be more likely to associate with the latter (caveat: I mention this because of a connection that the Riemann hypothesis has with quantum mechanics, where I know some of those things have been applied [at least one of them in quantum chaos, actually]; I'm not a number theorist, so don't take that comment too seriously).
My favorite line in the movie, which I can already only remember approximately, goes something like this: "Let her sleep. She was up late drinking heavily with the theoretical physicists last night." Amen to that!
2 days ago
4 comments:
Hey Mason.
I like the layout of your blog alot. Pretty colors, oooh.
If you like Proof, I'll check it out sometime. I tend to stay away from mathy movies because sometimes the (bad) mathematics in them hurt my brain.
I DM'd a dystopian sci-fi game of D&D last night. The party hacker/ninja convinced a golem to self-destruct, taking out a few dozen innocents, so as to cover the party's escape. I sense an alignment shift in the near future...
Hey Ben!
I can't take any credit for the layout. This was the one among the templates that I liked the best. I didn't adjust it at all, so the only credit I can take is making a good choice among what other people made. :)
There was a bit of bad math in there, but the part they got right (in spirit) was the state of mind of the mathematician -- the whole thing about the best work being in the early 20s that most mathematicians believe, etc.
The D & D game sounds way cool, but your comment begs one questions: Was it a cheese golem? :)
This is actually the same template I chose when I first created my page a while back, but I changed over to the current one when I ressurected the blog.
And seriously, in a game like that, is anyone really innocent?
That is true. Hey Ben, let's have some more details. I'm interested in them anyway (independent of Lemming's point).
Great minds think alike. :) Or maybe you have just been sneaking into my subconscious thoughts without my realizing it?
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