Saturday, August 27, 2005

Excitement

I'm so excited.

It's not every day that you are sitting at your computer thinking about a new math movie coming out in the next coming month with Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins.

According to an article on the Young Mathematicians Network site the movie "Proof" is coming soon.

This seems like a well-received deviation from A Beautiful Mind, or maybe not. When looking at the Internet Movie Database page on Proof I found this:
The daughter of a brilliant but mentally disturbed mathematician, recently deceased, tries to come to grips with her possible inheritance; his insanity....


On the official website you can see the trailer, which isn't bad, but at the same time doesn't say much about the film.

I think I kind of like trailers like that, they are especially more appealing than trailers that lead you to think more of a movie than it ends up being (how I felt about the Village). But I'm guessing this film is really not that much about math, but more about the drama surrounding insanity and misconceptions of mathematicians.

Maybe society needs to think more of us, much more than just "geeks" or "nerds" who spend all their time working on math problems. Even then, what if we do do that, so what if we spend all our time doing that? Is there no value in loving your work? Should everyone hate their job and wait for the weekends?

What's wrong with loving what you do well?

Society puts these frames on what we should do and how we should be, but what about what we want? Does math hold value? Yes, of course it does. It's what makes so many things possible. The only reason someone's car looks awesome and has many of the features it has boils down to mathematics.

I've got my own predictions about the film, but what are yours from watching the trailer? One could read a little into my rant and piece that together with the trailer to get the gist of what I think, but I want to know what you think.

3 comments:

blithering moron said...

I haven't watched a lot of math movies. (Do a lot of math movies even exist?) I thought Stand and Deliver was pretty good though.

Old Wacky Hermit said...

Stand and Deliver is the ONLY math movie I can think of in which the mathematician was NOT insane. Well, OK, maybe that one with Matt Damon in it (the name slips my mind). I guess insanity is the only way people think the general public can relate to mathematicians, because to them, wanting to major in math at all is prima facie evidence of insanity.

Vanes63 said...

The Matt Damon movie is Good Will Hunting.

I agree that the general public think mathematicians are insane, if not for being introverts (which not all mathematicians are) then for loving numbers or loving working with numbers (because they have some form of math phobia or math anxiety).

People are weird and people should deal with and accept that fact.

Everyone likes different things, some people like studying Ears for goodness' sake! Why is it so weird/different that I or anyone else should like math?