Now we all know about Johnrussell “A Beautiful Mind” Crownash.
But what other movies, songs, TV shows, comics–hell, anything!–have given our mathematically inclined brethren and…(what’s the female equilent-- cisterns?) their decreed 15 minutes?
Movies-
“Straw Dogs” wherein a meek American mathematician metes out big butt-kickin to British bumpkins.
“The Bank” wherein an austere Australian Chaos-stician brings down big bank (butt!)
“Shallow Grave” wherein a creepy accountant cuts up cruel crooks and then tries to kill conniving colleagues.
Comics-
Gary Larsen (who else) and his —Add, Subtract, and Die!— “Punk Accountants”
Songs-
I can hear Bob Dylan singing something about “mathematicians” but can’t put my finger on it.
Help me out.
I wouldn’t count Shallow Grave, since that’s about an accountant, not a mathematician. There’s also Good Will Hunting, It’s My Turn, Antonia’s Line, Pi, A Hill on the Dark Side of the Moon, and Death of a Neapolitan Mathematician. There’s also some documentaries about mathematicians and some movies with mathematicians as minor characters. Do you know about the website “Math in the Movies”?:
In Alfred Hitchcock’s TORN CURTAIN, the espionage McGuffin (the secret spy thingie that moves the plot) is a mathematical formula, and the underground in Russia is identified as “Pi.” I think that Paul Newman is a physicist, rather than a mathematician, though, I can’t recall.
And, of course, Sherlock Holmes’ arch-nemesis and the Napoleon of Crime, Professor Moriarty, is a mathematician who wrote a brilliant treatise on the binomial theorem…
He had two: the binomial one and “The Dynamics of the Asteroid”. The “Dynamics” one was never explained. Isaac Asimov wrote a short story speculating on the contents of “Dynamics”…the theory that he came up with is far too cool to spoil here.
Yeah, one of the Black Widowers stories. That’s actually where I heard of Moriarty’s work in this regard.
Of course, while Asimov’s version of “Dynamics of (the/an) Asteroid” is certainly worthy of an evil genius, I’m not quite sure what nefarious (or even all that interesting) things one could do with the Binomial Theorem.
And Taran, it is most definitely The Dynamics of an Asteroid, “a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it”. Check the first chapter of The Valley of Fear.
> Clifton Fadiman once edited an anthology called Fantasia
> Mathematica . . .
Clifton Fadiman edited two anthologies of stories about mathematics: Fantasia Mathematica and The Mathematical Magpie. More recently two other people have edited anthologies that were explicitly designed to be in the tradition of Fadiman (not authorized by Fadiman, but still deliberately intended to be the same thing): Mathenauts edited by Rudy Rucker and Imaginary Numbers edited by William Frucht.
For all his vaunted accuracy with respect to other scientific disciplines, the “math” in Larson’s cartoons was nothing but garbled-up numbers and symbols.
The comic strip that has actual mathematics in it from time to time is Bill Amend’s FoxTrot strip, which would still be one of the best strips around if it didn’t have a lick of math in it. But it does, and it does it right.
One could argue that Asimov’s “Foundation” series is based on the work of mathematicians. Of course, he calls them “psycho-historians”, but they are clearly very mathematical…Timmy
Waitaminute… Since when does Larson have “vaunted scientific accuracy”? Things fall when unsupported, and bugs die when stomped on, and that’s about as far as his scientific accuracy goes, so far as I’ve ever seen. Not that I would have it any other way, mind.