Thursday, April 7, 2016

Genius by numbers: why Hollywood maths movies don't add up

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/apr/06/mathematics-movies-the-man-who-knew-infinity

In A Beautiful Mind (2001), for instance, Russell Crowe, playing troubled maths star John Forbes Nash Jr, writes formulae on his dorm window. This scene is echoed in The Social Network (2010), where Andrew Garfield sets out the equations for Facebook’s business model on a Harvard window while Jesse Eisenberg’s Mark Zuckerberg looks on. In the opening scene of Good Will Hunting (1997), janitor prodigy Matt Damon writes equations on a bathroom mirror.

Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind.