Here's another belated movie review.
I saw The Prestige on November 15th. It was a good movie but not a great one. I appreciated the whole Tesla deal (especially his Sound And Vision), but the movie isn't great even though it is rather polished. The ending was extremely good, though I feel a bit dumb for not actually guessing it in advance and being a little surprised.
By the way, if you want to see a picture of a mathematician with the stereotypical magician's face, go here. (I have several funny stories to tell about this guy. He's a prick and people like it when he's the brunt of jokes, so these stories get propagated.)
As it's been a while since I've seen the movie, I'm not sure what else I should point out except that the movie starts out when the two battling magicians are Young Dudes and progresses a decent bit toward their Golden Years even though their mentor doesn't seem to age at all.
1 day ago
2 comments:
I haven't heard of Hubbard, but I have heard Persi Diaconis give a talk, I think at Furman University in the mid-90's. He is a mathematician and a magician, a fascinating guy.
I heard Persi speak at Cornell when I was a graduate student. He is extremely well-known not only for his mathematics but also for his interesting background. Now that you bring him up, I can't believe I didn't think of mentioning him in the blog entry per se because of course his background is particularly appropriate here. Persi is definitely on the short list of best speakers in the mathematical sciences community.
Hubbard is well-known in mathematics, as much for his ego as his research, but he's not that well-known outside of these circles. Scientists can get into wikipedia in a couple different ways, where the most prominent bifurcation is whether they are famous only within the community because of their research or whether they were newsworthy for perhaps some other reason so that a fair number of laypeople know who they are (regardless of whether or not their scientific achievements are stellar). For example, some mathematicians that wikipedia lists are still in graduate school but got enough publicity from kicking major ass on the Putnam exam that they got a fair bit of publicity as a human interest story. Hence, outside people might be more likely to have heard of them than, say, John Hubbard, even though they have very little of a mathematical career per se at this point.
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