1997’s Good Will Hunting, directed by Gus Van Sant, is an excellent drama about a troubled young math genius who learns to overcome his past demons and open his heart to those that want to care for him. This film launched the careers of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck and showed the world that these two actors were very talent, not only in acting but also in writing a damn good script. It was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won two, one for Best Supporting Actor (Robin Williams) and one for Best Original Screenplay (Damon and Affleck). Stupendous acting from the entire cast, an excellent script, a memorable and uplifting story, and a great soundtrack all make Good Will Hunting an easy recommendation to movie lovers.
But I don’t really want to talk about the movie, per se. I’d much rather talk about the depiction of mathematics within the movie. WAIT, DON’T LEAVE!!! I completely understand that mathematics does not interest everyone the same way it interests myself, but I do feel it is important that an academically themed movie such as Good Will Hunting gets its subject matter right. Ever since mathematician Sir Andrew Wiles famously completed the proof for Fermat’s Last Theorem back in 1995, several members of the entertainment industry became interested in mathematics and released a number of plays, movies, and novels that largely focused on math and members of the field. They found that math was a very versatile tool for storytelling; you can pull enough techno-babble out of it to make a given character appear smart, and yet find simple problems and pretty pictures to “edutain” the audience with. But as an aspiring mathematician AND a film lover, I want to know whether a particular movie does the math culture justice, whether they care about the mathematicians and their work or just indiscriminately used confusing notation and terminology solely for convenience. And in the case of Good Will Hunting, I regret to say that the math is rather ridiculous.
The mathematician in this film is fictional MIT professor and Fields medalist Gerald Lambeau, played by Stellan Skarsgård. Skarsgård is actually an excellent casting choice for part, just because he naturally looks like your average math professor. It is kind of unnerving, though, to see Lambeau hit on every female student he comes in contact with in this movie, but whatever. The class that Lambeau teaches is “Applied Theories”, which is a hilariously generic name for a college math course. It would be like if they offered a philosophy class called “Reading a Bunch of Old, Weird Books”. I couldn’t really tell if the class is undergraduate or graduate level. I’m guessing undergraduate, just based on the stuff written on the chalkboards and the large class size. But, of course, according to the MIT website, the course doesn’t exist in real-life.
Early in the movie, Lambeau announces in class that he put a problem on a chalkboard in the halls of the math building. He said that anyone who could solve the problem would be in the same intellectual category as the other MIT professors and many other brilliant scientists. Sometime after class, a student rushes to Lambeau and informs him that the problem has been solved. He goes up to the chalkboard, followed by many students, and confirms that the answer given is correct, although the identity of the problem solver is unknown (of course, its Damon’s character).
There isn’t really a good view of the chalkboard problem, but it can be seen in its entirety and has been copied down by many observant viewers (You can see it here). The problem is actually four problems, all relating to graph theory. I have never taken a course in graph theory, but I could easily answer the first two problems off the top of my head. I knew what had to be done for the other two, but I didn’t know the right theorems to simplify it enough for a satisfying answer. Still, all of the problems are simple exercises that you would see in a linear algebra or discrete mathematics college course, and yet they have been played up in this movie to be super hard.
But that’s not all. After the problem had been solved, Lambeau announces in class that he is going to put another problem up, and this one is able to challenge even the greatest minds in the world. He states that it personally took him two years of research to solve this problem. Similar to before, the problem is actually two problems. The first one is simply finding Cayley’s formula, which Arthur Cayley proved way back in 1889. The second problem is a very simple exercise taught in any given undergraduate graph theory class. Here is a video that shows just how easily it can be solved.
Damon’s character says to Lambeau late in the movie that he can do all of the work very easily and that Lambeau’s research is a joke. And you know what? I agree! This guy is supposed to have a Fields medal, one of the most prestigious awards a mathematician can receive, and yet he just wastes time throughout the movie dinking around with graph enumeration problems. Now don’t get me wrong, graph enumeration is a very important aspect of math and is certainly Fields medal-worthy. But the problems that he does are obviously at the undergraduate level, involving really small graphs that no one cares about. If the creators of this movie were trying to make Lambeau look like a very smart mathematician, they probably would’ve been better off using nonsensical notational jibberish instead.
Now don’t get me wrong here, I admit that I am being very nitpicky in this review. The attention in this movie is not really given to the mathematical work. The problems on the chalkboard are barely visible and were obviously not taken to be essential to the plot. And it is perfectly reasonable for them to use the problems that they used; graph theory is a highly visual subject in math and its work looks good on the screen. It was also nice that they told the story about the real-life mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan. Still, though, it was very annoying that they didn’t show off some advanced mathematical theorems, if only to appease the highly mathematical viewers such as myself.
However, nothing that I have said above detracts from the greatness of the movie. Everything that I have just described accounts for less than 10 minutes of the actual running time. If you love math like I do, you will be somewhat disappointed in the math shown on the screen, if you even pay close enough attention to it. Fortunately, you can easily take your mind off of it by watching the fantastic story instead. And even if you can’t tell a square root symbol from a pi symbol, you will still thoroughly enjoy this heartfelt film.
Rating of the movie: 4 Stars
Rating of the math: 2 Stars
Distributed by Miramax Films
Studio: Lawrence Bender Productions
Running time: 126 minutes
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