There is a scene in Good Will Hunting where Damon’s character is doing some sort of math that looks something like this:
. .
\ /
.
/ \
What branch of math is this? I tried googling but I don’t know what to call it so I didn’t have very good luck.
Probably graph theory.
Here is a picture. Is this graph theory?
Yep, that’s definitely graph theory.
Not only graphy theory, but particularly simple graph theory.
Basically, forget the math in that movie because “math” was a last-minute thing anyhow. It was supposed to be physics, but they thought that more people in the audience would find mathematics alien and strange than physics.
Not only simple, but wrong. Not all of the graphs have 10 nodes.
That’s probably why I didn’t recognize it. 
Thanks guys.
In fact, forget about trying to make any sense of the math used in that movie. The mathematical work shown on the boards in the movie is, in some sense, real math, but it’s often wildly inappropriate to the sort of math it’s supposed to be. A problem on the board will be called an incredibly difficult problem for grad students when it’s an ordinary homework problem for undergrads. The detail in the film was only minimally checked by the mathematical consultant.
Which is still far, far better than most of the math you see in movies. I cringed every time I saw a blackboard in the recent The Time Machine… The math wasn’t just not right, it wasn’t even wrong. It looked like some props designer for the movie looked through a math book he didn’t understand for some pretty symbols, and arranged them randomly on the board with a few numbers thrown in (which is probably exactly what happened, for that matter). At least the math in Good Will Hunting meant something, even if it was trivial. Baby steps, man.
One has to wonder why. WIth an ~ $80 million film, why not go the extra inch, shell out $5,000 and get a math professor/doctoral student to generate suitably impressive-looking computations that are also suitably correct. Doing so would have taken about two hours and given the film a bit more credibility.
Many math doctoral students would do it for a decent meal/lifetime SDMB membership :D.
Because nobody cares? I mean, gimme a break. Most *grad math students * don’t care.
From my Linux machine’s fortune file:
It would be pretty easy to make completely incomprehensible gibberish on a blackboard by putting APL code up there. It isn’t mathematical but it would fool most people.
At least the math question that John Nash asked his class in A Beautiful Mind was about the right level…
Well, maybe for the time. I’m not sure what constituted a multivariable calculus class back then. Still, I’d find it amazing for any such course to answer that question (which is actually pretty trivial once you’ve got some homology theory down).
I think you’re wrong. My guess is that many, many mathematically savvy movie goers worldwide cringed at these cheesy movie segments and also think that many directors and screenwriters have enough pride that they want to get things reasonably correct. Maybe this film was the exception, but Hollywood often goes to incredible pains to replicate costumes, set designs, accents, etc. True, these are usually period pieces, but since the film in question tangentially deals with mathematics, why not spend a few grand and get things right? It would have been easy to do and would give the movie more authenticity. Sorry to burst your bubble, but many people do care about such things.
As a computer programmer, I always cringe when computers are shown on TV or in the movies. When they’re an actual part of the plot, things get much worse. Remember “War Games” or “The Net”? Although we may care about such things, the people that make the movies must not.
I particularly love CSI when they are matching fingerprints and you get to see the program flash each fingerprint on the screen. And when it finally “sees” a match, we get to see the flashing 36 point “MATCH FOUND”.
Get real. The number of people who could discern the issue as a percentage of the population watching the movie is so small as to be insignificant. THAT is why the producers don’t bother with the issue.
I belong to a forum for type 1 diabetics. One time the discussion turned to the ridiculously inaccurate way IDDm (type 1 diabetes) and the people who have it are portrayed in such movies as “Con Air” and “The Panic Room”. Up until that point we didn’t realize that one of our members was actually a consultant hired often by script writers and directors to add some authentication to their projects that involved IDDM. She affirmed that, even though they paid her good money to give her advice on the errors in the script, she was universally ignored. “Drama” was better than “facts”, even when they could have easily gone hand in hand. It was a constant msytery to her as to why they even hired her.
Oh, I don’t know. You don’t think 1980-era computers would process commands written in full English sentences, and respond in kind? Especially a computer (an IMSAI 8080) with a spacious 256 bytes of RAM?
You don’t think that NORAD would attach a voice synthesizer to their computer, and pipe the sound through the room’s PA system? And that that voice synthesizer would be the same make and model as the one used by a teenage hobbyist? On his IMSAI? (Was NORAD using IMSAIs?! Oh god, please no.)
Hey, open your mind, man.
Clearly the contractors accidentally left in some debug code. Or maybe the database query software has a “More dramatic tension” checkbox in the preferences, that the criminologists like to leave on.
Also, “Make little blip noises whenever the screen changes appearance.” They check that one too.
