Proof

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!