I heard the same thing from a well-known forensic scientist. He was invited to Hollywood to consult on the television show Quincy. He said they ignored everything they were told.
Few people watching a period piece are aware that a particular hairstyle, hat, purse, waistcoat, carriage, rifle, tobacco brand, political movement, architecture, etc etc etc is historically appropriate, but some producers do give a damn. Good Will Hunting doesn’t fall within this genre, but getting things right would have been so easy with no downside. Why produce a math-themed show that math experts chortle at?
Good Will Hunting isn’t “math-themed.” The character is supposed to be skilled at math and he works a bit for a math professor, but
A) It’s not about math and math is not a major thematic element, and
B) It’s extremely well established that Will Hunting is not just a skilled mathematician; he’s good at almost anything academic. We see him display uncommon brilliance at organic chemistry, and his command of American history and law are almost uncanny. You can’t even say he’s just a math whiz.
The reason they didn’t bother to get the math right is that it simply doesn’t matter. The film is about men getting over their emotional problems.
Dewey Finn probably explained it–they probably did have a real mathematician on set (they work cheap), but their suggestions were … unaesthetic
I’m not attempting to support the producers for failing to get it right. I was responding to your attempt to assert that the reason they should get it right was the hordes of math-savvy people who would notice if they got it wrong.
And, for what it is worth, almost no “period piece” gets all the aspects of the time correct: costume, architecture, language, weapons, etc. Usually, the reason boils down to one of three things: lack of care, lack of budget, or different expectations among the audience.
Then there’s the case of Kathleen Coleman, the Harvard professor hired as historical consultant on Gladiator, a stint that produced this rant from her afterwards.
Personally, I suspect she set her hopes way too high at the start. In the one case where I’ve tangentially known someone - a grad student in theoretical physics - who acted as consultant on a Hollywood picture, the makers just wanted some vaguely scientificy formulae and he was quite happy to take their cash for giving them just that.
Just for the nitpick record, and in the interest of accuracy – this thread is about that, right? – my IMSAI 8080 could address 64K (16 bits) of RAM.
Although that left no address room for ROM or addressable I/O, and the 64K board alone cost $2700. But you didn’t have to solder it or insert the chips like the older, 1, 4, 8, and 16K boards.
Ah, memories.
I think she kind of has a point. Her name is attached to a work that’s full of historical errors. The average person won’t know who she is or what the errors are, so in that respect it doesn’t matter, but the people she sees at the Ancient Rome research conferences or whatever will. From her perspective, her name is attached to a shoddy piece of work, and that will hurt her academic reputation, despite the fact that she did extensive research for the film.
On the other hand, she does seem to have assumed that the filmmakers wanted to produce an actual historical documentary, which is a bit naive to say the least.
From vaious statements I’ve seen over the years, consults and so forth seem to have a very self-centered (well, not exactly, but you get the idea) view of historical movies. If it’s not a textbook rendition, it sucks. Practical problems don’t seem to impact on them. Heck, Braveheart’s batle scenes were supposed to be quite different in some respects, but proved impossible to film. The battles of the movie were in some cases going to take place in a wholly different (and more historical) place than it ultimately was. But rain, expense, and so on meant that Gibson moved productions at the last minute.
Were the histroian blabers thankful that a minor but fascinating episode in Scottish history got so much play in a dramatic sense? No, it was all whine, whine, whine that the fanciful drama was… a fanciful drama.
No, Rickjay is correct. %99.99 of the population does not care about the various minutia of continuity errors and historical accuracy that some film geeks seem to find so important. And of those people who do actually notice those things, most of the time it is just an amusing observation, not something that detracts from their enjoyment of the movie.
I always just assumed that the math on most movie blackboards was gibberish.
In a slightly different slant on the same topic, my husband was a dairy farmer for 23 years, and knows a great deal about modern dairy animals. He has also done substantial research into older breeds of dairy and beef cattle, because it interests him. Every time a cow appears in a movie set before, say, 1960, he is deeply grieved. They invariably use modern dairy animals (the BBC’s production of James Herriot’s vet stories are a notable exception), which are instantly recognizable to the Man on the Street, but don’t really look like the cattle that would have been present in England in the 1930s or the US at the turn of the century. Treatise on recent breeding for specific traits deleted.
No one else I have met has ever noticed this. Ever. (Except me, now.) The percentage of people that would notice is very small, and the percentage that would care is even smaller. Given those facts, if a producer can film on a farm 10 miles away using modern Holstein cattle, or research and procure a heritage Devon herd at great expense and trouble, what’s he going to do? Use the Holsteins, if he has any brains at all.
I’d say the same thing applies to the math. Yeah, they could find someone who could give them the appropriate stuff to fling on the blackboard, but really, how many people notice? Almost none. Worth it? Probably not.
Of course, as a former software jockey, the stuff they do with computers drives me crazy. THAT, they should fix. 
Except, apparently, the term ‘Subdural Haematoma’ - there was one of these in every episode.
The cost to get a grad student to contribute during production is minimal. They spend at least that much shopping productions to mathematicians after the fact[1]. Having accurate mathematics in a production which involves mathematics will often create a cachet among mathematicians, which I’m willing to bet will outweigh the minimal cost to tweak the production.
As an example, It’s My Turn is still well-known among mathematicians for the opening scene (the only part that directly involves mathematics) which proves the Snake Lemma so well that some homological algebra texts actually refer to the movie rather than restate the proof.
[1] Case in point: NUMB3RS sent our department – and many others – the full first season last September to get our comments. Why they didn’t ask someone to keep them honest before shooting the show I don’t know.
I still think that there are math geeks out there who would pay to do this. 
Mathochist and Mentock, I bow to your superior knowledge of math and the amounts for which math grad students are willing to work. If it’s anything like what I was willing to work for as an undergrad, I feel for them. I’m sure you’re right and it wouldn’t actually be that hard to get the math right.
Movies, though, mostly play to a common denominator. They just want to have something on the screen that people will register as “pastoral scene with cows” or “math I can’t hope to understand.” Mostly, that’s what they get, and I suspect they don’t really care if it’s correct.
Given that Dopers are MUCH smarter than the population at large 
, and only a few Dopers care, I’m betting the percentage of people that know and care is so small as to be statistically insignificant.
I think what the participants of this thread would like (me, too) is to make people care. Sadly, I don’t think we can.
At least not without those cool mind-ray thingies I saw in that one movie …
But they should care, damnit! Don’t the filmmakers take enough pride in their work to at least try to get the details right?
I guess the answer, in general, is no. 
This example is, if anything, even more extreme. Before he made that decision, the producer would have to know that there was a difference between modern cows and historical cows in the first place. I consider myself relatively well-educated, and I do know the first and maybe second thing about farming (but not the third, fourth, or fifth), and I didn’t know that until just now. On the other hand, I would expect even the most Hollywoodized producer to know that there’s a difference between correct math and wrong math, and that some small portion of his audience can tell the difference.
Incidentally, Mathochist, what’s the Snake Lemma? (A statement of it will suffice; this is probably not the place for a proof).
Au contraire. I think you’ll find that it was either **Marcus Welby ** or **Dr. Kildare ** that was enamored of the subdural haematoma. In fact, my father used to joke about that fact when I was a kid, long before Quincy went on the air.
I thought it was supposed to be encryption? I seem to remember the script that Affleck & Damon wrote being wildly different than the movie that was filmed, which confused me as to why they won an Oscar for it.
I think they realised during shooting that graph theory was more photogenic than encryption.