|
|
|
|
|
|
by The_suffocated
106 days ago
|
|
|
The article is well written but its title is a click bait. Although the film portrays mathematicians in a negative way and the allegedly hard problem on the blackboard is actually an easy homework exercise that every decent first-year student is able to solve, I don’t think the film has ever gathered any hatred among mathematicians. |
|
|
If you want to know a movie that I actually heard mathematicians discussing, it would be "A Beautiful Mind", and then only because some people were complaining about how the minor characters misrepresented the mathematicians and especially how the Princeton Math department was unfairly caricatured in order to create dramatic tension (you need an antagonist, after all).
In reality Nash was treated with incredible generosity and kindness, and was given extreme affordances. For example, he visited Nirenberg at Courant and gave him a stack of hundreds of pages of dense, hand written notes that were the proof of the embedding theorem, and Nirenberg took enormous time to go through it and try to understand what Nash did, and then championed the proof. With no renumeration or credit, just as a professional courtesy and desire to see if the proof is correct. Nash was not easy to work with, but because so many people were willing to devote time to reviewing and correcting the proof -- which took 5 years -- it was eventually published. Moser, Gromov, Chern, and Kuiper all played a massive role, donating huge amounts of their personal time in order to help Nash.
But, as is usually the case with real life, it doesn't make for a good 2 hour dramatic story. It's a shame, because the real story is a great story.