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.
Applied math is useful to solve actual problems. Theoretical math is largely fan fiction, good for writing lots of papers and employing people who aren't really that useful...but who want to convince everyone else that their imaginary problems are what's really important, and that they should be supported due to how clever they are.
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