With the award ceremony for the Oscars this month, many people are thinking back on past winners—including Good Will Hunting. It’s worth taking a closer look at the blackboard in a film that, in 1997, took nine nominations and won for both original screenplay and actor in a supporting role. ...No, that is not why mathematicians hate the movie.But I still think the filmmakers chose this particular math problem poorly, even for a Hollywood film.
The hero is a fictional exceptionally talented math prodigy. Supposedly he enjoys math so much that he gets a job as an MIT janitor, and eavesdrop on the research there.
But he never spends any of his free time doing math. Instead he goes drinking with his non-math buddies, and getting into fights. In the end, he decides that math is for losers, and he abandons a wonderful math opportunity in favor of chasing a girlfriend.
Nobody gets that good at math unless he enjoys it very much. The movie fails to portray that at all.
