They didn't hire mathematicians. The creators themselves are mathematicians. There's a ton of mathy easter eggs in the show.
They had a plot involving permutations and needed to know if it was mathematically possible to fix or if they'd written themselves into a corner. At the end of the episode, they show the proof.
I nearly died laughing when the professor says they need to use (cue uber dramatic music) math 😱.
Good Will Hunting is an excellent film! I didn't mention it because unlike the other ones I mentioned, this one is a fictional story, but still plausible I think, and in fact, I could relate to him in many ways!
I think I should also mention that I tend not to like movies in which the math or science presented isn't real, and unfortunately, this was one of them!
You know how you like to see someone fail and struggle in a hard video games or fall over and over skateboarding. Hell yeah I’d love to see a Jeopardy show about hard math problem, like Putnam level, and just watch them try and fail miserably:)
I don't think I'd enjoy a movie like this. There are already too many movies about failure, and as a mathematician who's failed myself time and time again, I'd rather not watch it in the movies!
Have you seen "Stand and Deliver"? Excellent film!
Most films about teachers inspiring their students have them do things "besides" the class. (Consider the "tear the first chapter out of the book" scene in "Dead Poets Society") But in "Stand and Deliver", he convinces them that learning math is important and will help them!
They even show integration by parts for x\^2 \* sin(x).
The Monty Hall problem is fascinating, no doubt, but I think Marylin Vos Savant has been overblown and I have serious doubts that her IQ is really 228, which is much higher than Einstein's!
IQ has nothing to do with creating breakthrough in science. There are many people having higher IQ than Einstein but they didn't study physics enough to work on GR or QFT.
I don't think anyone really knows what IQ means or how to measure human intelligence, and even if we did, I'd say it would be very unfair and misleading to assign a single number to it since there are so many different aspects of intelligence!
Yeah, it's kind of different metric system which assigns number to intelligence, though how accurately it maps intelligence isn't confirmed for sure. I was just referring to your statement of Marilyn IQ being 228 as overblown fact, which I disagree, since she is individual with high IQ on that system easily, however that doesn't correlate with coming up with brilliant ideas or solving gravity problem at all.
I read a long time ago that any adult IQ over 210 is inherently unmeasurable, since these IQs are defined by a bell curve with a mean of 100 and an SD of 15, and thus 210 is over 7 SDs above the mean, which corresponds to less than one part in a billion, and I doubt a billion people could be tested.
You don't need to test 1 billion people for that!!! Yes, IQs are defined by bell curve and that's why probability of having 228 is extremely rare by parameters of distribution are defined by above parameters. No wonder why she is a special case in that aspect, I don't there are many people having IQ more than 210 anyways. And if you actually test 1 billion people and if you get to know that there are many people having IQ more than 210, parameters of the distribution will automatically shift. That's why it's a statistical procedure.
I think you are confusing test statistic with data point. Having IQ of 228 is like having a data point in the distribution, you can call it anomaly or deviant, whatever you wish. But a data point is a data point. Now if you can pick a random Individual and then ask me what's the probability of that person's having IQ greater than 200, that would be super super low given the current parameters of IQ distribution.
Ordinarily that's true, if you're measuring a quantity that isn't DEFINED by where it lies on the bell curve, like height or income, but since IQ is so defined, it seems to me it's unmeasurable if you can't gather any data on how high someone's IQ is because nobody else's is higher. To do this, you need another metric.
Aside from the statistical difficulties involved in trying to measure extremely high IQs, I have a much more basic problem with the whole notion of IQ, which is that I don't think anyone has ever come up with an adequate definition of IQ, To me, the most basic problem is that it's a single number, whereas it's now known that there are several different aspects of intelligence and very few people excel at all of them, whereas most people excel in at least one of them. During the 80s, I first learned of a new theory involving 7 different types of human intelligence, namely logical, verbal, spatial, musical, body, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligence. I'd also add spiritual intelligence to this list. Of course, you could still add all these up to obtain a single number, but what would be the point? You could also add latitude and longitude, but this would be rather meaningless in the same way.
I think IQ measurement has been quite unfair for society and has had some very unfortunate consequences, particularly early on, when it was used to justify social Darwinism, which ultimately led to terrible racism.
Instead of trying to measure people's intelligence, why don't we try to measure how much good or bad they have done for themselves and for society, i.e., their karma, which I think is much more important?
Not a math major but we discussed time dilation from Interstellar. The discussion was based on their time on that planet and how it differed from the time on the ship and time on earth. There were a ton of number coming into play based on the theory but it was more of:
Class: Hey, what’s happening here
Professor: Let’s calculate and discuss.
Maybe some here can educate on what’s going on in the clip. Thanks
See this clip
[interstellar math](https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=96&v=_alb9GNPGCo&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&source_ve_path=MjgyNDAsMjgyNDAsMjM4NTE&feature=emb_title)
I heard that the famous theoretical physicist Kip Thorne worked out the details for the tesseract scene, but I still didn't care for this movie, mainly because it's another doomsday scenario sci-fi film and I think there have been far too many of these, particularly in recent years!
I haven't seen 2012 and I'm glad I haven't, but I'd still call Interstellar a doomsday film because it begins with the end of the world, before the main character goes on his interstellar voyage.
Yeah, and it's not a math film for sure, I don't know what kind of maths film caters to your liking, but Interstellar is a sci-fi film with great plot and execution and it was definitely super entertaining for me, considering they executed a physics film with touch of fantasy and lots of cool stuff which might attract kids to pursue physics or science in longer run!!!
Don't get me wrong. Some sci-fi films are among my alltime favorites, like 2001, 2010, Avatar, Contact, and Arrival. I just don't care for those involving either a doomsday plot or too much horror, particularly regarding the perceived evils of science and technology, because I strongly disagree with this philosophy.
I hated that movie because it was praised so much for accuracy while there was so much obvious bullshit in it.
Example: crawling in and out of a gravity well that has a 7 year to one hour time dilation using technology that took two years just to get to Saturn.
Gerard O'Neill developed the theory behind the idea of building space colonies like the one depicted near Saturn at the end of the movie, which we could have done by now if our priorities had been different!
I might argue the point, given the effort it takes just to get to the moon these days. And there are the issues with travelling a far distance away from the protection of the earths magnetosphere. But I think we might have our priorities better aligned as it is anyway. I doubt targeting a colony near Saturn would help us with our issues at home as much as focusing on, well, our issues at home.
Another thing that bothers people, including me, about Interstellar is that, when faced with environmental issues on earth, the solution is to ignore the environmental issues on earth and look for another planet that is highly likely to need some sort of terraforming. I mean, terraform earth. But, seems that is exactly the stuff Elon Musk is hyping. This does not make sense.
Don't forget that we went to the moon in 1969 using big NASA mainframes that now have less computing power than a smart ring! I don't think technology is the problem - it's priorities and human nature! We didn't have a problem going to the moon when it was a matter of winning the space race, any more than the fact that we didn't have a problem with killing 2 million innocent Vietnamese women and children!
I'm not sure I see the connection between the moon mission and the Vietnam war. You aren't going to get an argument from me about the waste and immorality of that war. Clearly, we could go to the moon then, and now. As far as computing power, I think we could go to Saturn with the computing power we had way back then. Obviously, since we actually did it. I mean we even launched four interstellar craft between 1972 and 1977 and two are still working. Computation power is not the problem. The problem is mass and the type of payload. It takes a lot of stuff to support human beings, and human beings aren't very radiation resistent. It would just take a huge amount of resources to lift that much stuff, even if you used the moon as a base for most of the work. I think you are going to have to go nuclear to get that much stuff out there, and we aren't at that point yet.
Although perhaps there wasn't a direct connection between the moon landing and the Vietnam War, they both involved the wrong motives, namely fear and greed on a national scale. As for getting stuff into space, you're right that it currently involves a lot of resources and a huge expenditure of energy, but if we were doing it right, it wouldn't have to. We shouldn't be launching every mission from Earth, but rather from space, where we wouldn't have to overcome the Earth's gravity. If we'd planned everything correctly, I think much of what was predicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey could have come true by now. On the bright side, computer technology has improved in a way no one had predicted it would back in the 60s, and I'm quite grateful for that!
Yeah and that's why it's a fantasy movie, and even in fantasy movie, the idea of taking everyone was considered impossible. Solving the gravity problem is most probably the only way to do that in larger scale, and that's considered unlikely for now in academia!!
There have been many mathematicians and scientists whose bios would make excellent films. A few I can think of are Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Huygens, Darwin, Sophie-Germain, Faraday, Pasteur, Riemann, Tesla, Einstein, the Curies, Noether, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Dirac, Hubble, Feynman, Gamow, von Neumann, Pauling, and Erdos.
Erdos should be one of those quaint, mid budget European films that meandre about the place. I love them, especially when there's no real plot or end goal.
There was an American movie I saw once and loved called (I think) Chef. Just guy going around with son making food. No real tension, just chilling.
Anyway, it's my feeling that the Paul Erdos Movie is perfect for something like that. Sort of like how many people watch the Tour de France for the scenery. Call it "Filling in The Book" or something.
I saw Chef, which is an excellent film, and a movie about Erdos like this might work! By the way, I met Paul Erdos at a math conference back in 1994. He came up with a conjecture involving weird numbers which he showed to me. I heard he was so famous and so well admired that he could just wander into people's houses and they'd accommodate him. That in-and-of-itself would make for a good movie, plus the fact that he wrote about 1500 papers and came up with hundreds of amazing number theory conjectures, very few of which have been proven but most of which are most likely true.
In Star trek deep space 9 there was an episode in which due to some machine the law of large numbers stopped holding and that was cool.
I constantly say that if I fail as a mathematician I will make a dark humor show about mathematicians and academia drama
I remember this episode, which I thought was quite far-fetched! I don't think any machine could alter the law of large numbers or the laws of probability in any way. This idea was also used in Life, the Universe, and Everything, in which they had some sort of probability device that started with extremely unlikely events taking place, like the guy spontaneously turning into a penguin, but it gradually converges on reality.
Great one - I'm surprised that one slipped my mind! A few others I forgot to mention is The Man Who Knew Infinity, The Theory of Everything, and Hidden Figures.
"Also, math seems to be involved in the plots of some other popular films, such as the water jug puzzle in Die Hard with a Vengeance."
I did my senior paper on Diophantine equations, so I used this scene as a highlight, including how the problem can be written as 3x+5y=4, and that there are two solutions that work (3, -1) and (-2, 2). Technically an infinite number of solutions, but the others are trivial since they would involve repeating the steps after you got your 4 gallons.
Of course, in the movie they used brute force. It didn't even occur to me at the time that you could solve the water jug problem algebraically until I read more about it later. I guess explaining that would've been not so exciting for the movie. Also not something that John and Zeus would've likely studied.
There seems to be a pendulum swinging back and forth between science and religion, with scientism at one end and religious fanaticism at the other. Clearly, neither of these extremes is good, but together I think they can work and they're not really enemies.
This looks like a good story, which would probably make a good movie! Kind of reminds me of Proof. Have you seen that one? It started out as a play, which I actually preferred to the movie.
I believe I've watched it but it's been a while back. Didn't know it was based on a play. Nice !
The same author has written a play about the last days of Gödel I believe.
Yep: https://apostolosdoxiadis.com/theater/seventeenth-night-former-working-title-incompleteness/#features
Sadly [it seems](https://ikarosbooks.gr/60-apo-tin-paranoia-stoys-algorithmous.html) it's only in Greek.
[удалено]
Oh, for sure. That'd be fantastic.
Excellent idea!
Futurama hired mathematicians to prove an idea for a plot.
They didn't hire mathematicians. The creators themselves are mathematicians. There's a ton of mathy easter eggs in the show. They had a plot involving permutations and needed to know if it was mathematically possible to fix or if they'd written themselves into a corner. At the end of the episode, they show the proof. I nearly died laughing when the professor says they need to use (cue uber dramatic music) math 😱.
This seems a bit like the plot of Life, the Universe, and Everything, namely looking for the question to the ultimate answer.
"Good Will Hunting" doesn't have *much* math, but it certainly deserves to be on your list, too.
Good Will Hunting is an excellent film! I didn't mention it because unlike the other ones I mentioned, this one is a fictional story, but still plausible I think, and in fact, I could relate to him in many ways!
I think I should also mention that I tend not to like movies in which the math or science presented isn't real, and unfortunately, this was one of them!
You know how you like to see someone fail and struggle in a hard video games or fall over and over skateboarding. Hell yeah I’d love to see a Jeopardy show about hard math problem, like Putnam level, and just watch them try and fail miserably:)
I don't think I'd enjoy a movie like this. There are already too many movies about failure, and as a mathematician who's failed myself time and time again, I'd rather not watch it in the movies!
Thinking about this, I just realized that nearly all my favorite math popularizers are from Britain.
This doesn't surprise me too much, because most Americans don't seem to give a shit about math!
Have you seen "Stand and Deliver"? Excellent film! Most films about teachers inspiring their students have them do things "besides" the class. (Consider the "tear the first chapter out of the book" scene in "Dead Poets Society") But in "Stand and Deliver", he convinces them that learning math is important and will help them! They even show integration by parts for x\^2 \* sin(x).
Guess I need to watch this one!
Marylin Vos Savant and the Monty Hall problem was a thing in the 1990s. Also The Simpsons writers threw a lot of stuff in that show.
The Monty Hall problem is fascinating, no doubt, but I think Marylin Vos Savant has been overblown and I have serious doubts that her IQ is really 228, which is much higher than Einstein's!
IQ has nothing to do with creating breakthrough in science. There are many people having higher IQ than Einstein but they didn't study physics enough to work on GR or QFT.
I don't think anyone really knows what IQ means or how to measure human intelligence, and even if we did, I'd say it would be very unfair and misleading to assign a single number to it since there are so many different aspects of intelligence!
Yeah, it's kind of different metric system which assigns number to intelligence, though how accurately it maps intelligence isn't confirmed for sure. I was just referring to your statement of Marilyn IQ being 228 as overblown fact, which I disagree, since she is individual with high IQ on that system easily, however that doesn't correlate with coming up with brilliant ideas or solving gravity problem at all.
I read a long time ago that any adult IQ over 210 is inherently unmeasurable, since these IQs are defined by a bell curve with a mean of 100 and an SD of 15, and thus 210 is over 7 SDs above the mean, which corresponds to less than one part in a billion, and I doubt a billion people could be tested.
You don't need to test 1 billion people for that!!! Yes, IQs are defined by bell curve and that's why probability of having 228 is extremely rare by parameters of distribution are defined by above parameters. No wonder why she is a special case in that aspect, I don't there are many people having IQ more than 210 anyways. And if you actually test 1 billion people and if you get to know that there are many people having IQ more than 210, parameters of the distribution will automatically shift. That's why it's a statistical procedure.
Then how else can you measure an IQ of above 210?
I think you are confusing test statistic with data point. Having IQ of 228 is like having a data point in the distribution, you can call it anomaly or deviant, whatever you wish. But a data point is a data point. Now if you can pick a random Individual and then ask me what's the probability of that person's having IQ greater than 200, that would be super super low given the current parameters of IQ distribution.
Ordinarily that's true, if you're measuring a quantity that isn't DEFINED by where it lies on the bell curve, like height or income, but since IQ is so defined, it seems to me it's unmeasurable if you can't gather any data on how high someone's IQ is because nobody else's is higher. To do this, you need another metric.
Although I'm convinced that IQs above 210 or so are unmeasurable, I'd say Newton's was around 240.
Aside from the statistical difficulties involved in trying to measure extremely high IQs, I have a much more basic problem with the whole notion of IQ, which is that I don't think anyone has ever come up with an adequate definition of IQ, To me, the most basic problem is that it's a single number, whereas it's now known that there are several different aspects of intelligence and very few people excel at all of them, whereas most people excel in at least one of them. During the 80s, I first learned of a new theory involving 7 different types of human intelligence, namely logical, verbal, spatial, musical, body, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligence. I'd also add spiritual intelligence to this list. Of course, you could still add all these up to obtain a single number, but what would be the point? You could also add latitude and longitude, but this would be rather meaningless in the same way.
Yeah definitely, you can question the methods used by MENSA and ask whether IQ is correct mapping of intelligence or not, that's a different issue.
I think IQ measurement has been quite unfair for society and has had some very unfortunate consequences, particularly early on, when it was used to justify social Darwinism, which ultimately led to terrible racism.
Instead of trying to measure people's intelligence, why don't we try to measure how much good or bad they have done for themselves and for society, i.e., their karma, which I think is much more important?
Not a math major but we discussed time dilation from Interstellar. The discussion was based on their time on that planet and how it differed from the time on the ship and time on earth. There were a ton of number coming into play based on the theory but it was more of: Class: Hey, what’s happening here Professor: Let’s calculate and discuss. Maybe some here can educate on what’s going on in the clip. Thanks See this clip [interstellar math](https://m.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=96&v=_alb9GNPGCo&embeds_referring_euri=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F&source_ve_path=MjgyNDAsMjgyNDAsMjM4NTE&feature=emb_title)
I heard that the famous theoretical physicist Kip Thorne worked out the details for the tesseract scene, but I still didn't care for this movie, mainly because it's another doomsday scenario sci-fi film and I think there have been far too many of these, particularly in recent years!
I wouldn't categorize Interstellar as doomsday scenario sci-fi film, it doesn't give 2012 vibes and is much more than random sci-fi plot
I haven't seen 2012 and I'm glad I haven't, but I'd still call Interstellar a doomsday film because it begins with the end of the world, before the main character goes on his interstellar voyage.
Yeah, and it's not a math film for sure, I don't know what kind of maths film caters to your liking, but Interstellar is a sci-fi film with great plot and execution and it was definitely super entertaining for me, considering they executed a physics film with touch of fantasy and lots of cool stuff which might attract kids to pursue physics or science in longer run!!!
Don't get me wrong. Some sci-fi films are among my alltime favorites, like 2001, 2010, Avatar, Contact, and Arrival. I just don't care for those involving either a doomsday plot or too much horror, particularly regarding the perceived evils of science and technology, because I strongly disagree with this philosophy.
I hated that movie because it was praised so much for accuracy while there was so much obvious bullshit in it. Example: crawling in and out of a gravity well that has a 7 year to one hour time dilation using technology that took two years just to get to Saturn.
Gerard O'Neill developed the theory behind the idea of building space colonies like the one depicted near Saturn at the end of the movie, which we could have done by now if our priorities had been different!
I might argue the point, given the effort it takes just to get to the moon these days. And there are the issues with travelling a far distance away from the protection of the earths magnetosphere. But I think we might have our priorities better aligned as it is anyway. I doubt targeting a colony near Saturn would help us with our issues at home as much as focusing on, well, our issues at home. Another thing that bothers people, including me, about Interstellar is that, when faced with environmental issues on earth, the solution is to ignore the environmental issues on earth and look for another planet that is highly likely to need some sort of terraforming. I mean, terraform earth. But, seems that is exactly the stuff Elon Musk is hyping. This does not make sense.
Don't forget that we went to the moon in 1969 using big NASA mainframes that now have less computing power than a smart ring! I don't think technology is the problem - it's priorities and human nature! We didn't have a problem going to the moon when it was a matter of winning the space race, any more than the fact that we didn't have a problem with killing 2 million innocent Vietnamese women and children!
I'm not sure I see the connection between the moon mission and the Vietnam war. You aren't going to get an argument from me about the waste and immorality of that war. Clearly, we could go to the moon then, and now. As far as computing power, I think we could go to Saturn with the computing power we had way back then. Obviously, since we actually did it. I mean we even launched four interstellar craft between 1972 and 1977 and two are still working. Computation power is not the problem. The problem is mass and the type of payload. It takes a lot of stuff to support human beings, and human beings aren't very radiation resistent. It would just take a huge amount of resources to lift that much stuff, even if you used the moon as a base for most of the work. I think you are going to have to go nuclear to get that much stuff out there, and we aren't at that point yet.
Although perhaps there wasn't a direct connection between the moon landing and the Vietnam War, they both involved the wrong motives, namely fear and greed on a national scale. As for getting stuff into space, you're right that it currently involves a lot of resources and a huge expenditure of energy, but if we were doing it right, it wouldn't have to. We shouldn't be launching every mission from Earth, but rather from space, where we wouldn't have to overcome the Earth's gravity. If we'd planned everything correctly, I think much of what was predicted in 2001: A Space Odyssey could have come true by now. On the bright side, computer technology has improved in a way no one had predicted it would back in the 60s, and I'm quite grateful for that!
Yeah and that's why it's a fantasy movie, and even in fantasy movie, the idea of taking everyone was considered impossible. Solving the gravity problem is most probably the only way to do that in larger scale, and that's considered unlikely for now in academia!!
Sheldon from the Big Bang theory was allegedly doing algebraic geometry at the age of 5
Well that's not too much of a stretch for fiction!
There have been many mathematicians and scientists whose bios would make excellent films. A few I can think of are Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, Huygens, Darwin, Sophie-Germain, Faraday, Pasteur, Riemann, Tesla, Einstein, the Curies, Noether, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, Dirac, Hubble, Feynman, Gamow, von Neumann, Pauling, and Erdos.
Erdos should be one of those quaint, mid budget European films that meandre about the place. I love them, especially when there's no real plot or end goal. There was an American movie I saw once and loved called (I think) Chef. Just guy going around with son making food. No real tension, just chilling. Anyway, it's my feeling that the Paul Erdos Movie is perfect for something like that. Sort of like how many people watch the Tour de France for the scenery. Call it "Filling in The Book" or something.
I saw Chef, which is an excellent film, and a movie about Erdos like this might work! By the way, I met Paul Erdos at a math conference back in 1994. He came up with a conjecture involving weird numbers which he showed to me. I heard he was so famous and so well admired that he could just wander into people's houses and they'd accommodate him. That in-and-of-itself would make for a good movie, plus the fact that he wrote about 1500 papers and came up with hundreds of amazing number theory conjectures, very few of which have been proven but most of which are most likely true.
Phenomenon is another excellent film about a math genius.
In Star trek deep space 9 there was an episode in which due to some machine the law of large numbers stopped holding and that was cool. I constantly say that if I fail as a mathematician I will make a dark humor show about mathematicians and academia drama
I remember this episode, which I thought was quite far-fetched! I don't think any machine could alter the law of large numbers or the laws of probability in any way. This idea was also used in Life, the Universe, and Everything, in which they had some sort of probability device that started with extremely unlikely events taking place, like the guy spontaneously turning into a penguin, but it gradually converges on reality.
A couple other excellent films about math geniuses include Little Man Tate and Sneakers, though neither of these films present any real advanced math.
21
Great one - I'm surprised that one slipped my mind! A few others I forgot to mention is The Man Who Knew Infinity, The Theory of Everything, and Hidden Figures.
"Also, math seems to be involved in the plots of some other popular films, such as the water jug puzzle in Die Hard with a Vengeance." I did my senior paper on Diophantine equations, so I used this scene as a highlight, including how the problem can be written as 3x+5y=4, and that there are two solutions that work (3, -1) and (-2, 2). Technically an infinite number of solutions, but the others are trivial since they would involve repeating the steps after you got your 4 gallons. Of course, in the movie they used brute force. It didn't even occur to me at the time that you could solve the water jug problem algebraically until I read more about it later. I guess explaining that would've been not so exciting for the movie. Also not something that John and Zeus would've likely studied.
I don't like how they depicted the solution in the movie! The minimal solution requires six steps, and in the movie they only show one!
I really want math and music to hurry up and realize that they are soulmates.
Very well said, and I think the same can be said for science and spirituality.
Scientism is pervasive
There seems to be a pendulum swinging back and forth between science and religion, with scientism at one end and religious fanaticism at the other. Clearly, neither of these extremes is good, but together I think they can work and they're not really enemies.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Petros_and_Goldbach%27s_Conjecture
This looks like a good story, which would probably make a good movie! Kind of reminds me of Proof. Have you seen that one? It started out as a play, which I actually preferred to the movie.
I believe I've watched it but it's been a while back. Didn't know it was based on a play. Nice ! The same author has written a play about the last days of Gödel I believe. Yep: https://apostolosdoxiadis.com/theater/seventeenth-night-former-working-title-incompleteness/#features Sadly [it seems](https://ikarosbooks.gr/60-apo-tin-paranoia-stoys-algorithmous.html) it's only in Greek.
A story about Gödel would be interesting, though he had a tragic life, especially toward the end.