Why mathematicians hate Good Will Hunting
10 hours ago
- #Good Will Hunting
- #George Dantzig
- #Mathematics in Film
- The movie 'Good Will Hunting' features a janitor solving a complex math problem, which is later revealed to be unrealistic.
- The film was inspired by the true story of George Dantzig, a graduate student who solved famous unsolved statistics problems.
- The math problem in the movie involves drawing homeomorphically irreducible trees of size n=10, which is simpler than presented.
- A tree in mathematics is a graph without loops, and 'homeomorphic' refers to the sequence of connections being more important than the shape.
- The problem can be approached by drawing graphs manually or using equations to represent the constraints of the trees.
- The article suggests that real-life mathematical breakthroughs by non-experts, like finding the 'einstein tile', would make better film material.