Subject: Re: [HM] The Good Will Hunting principle
From: Bill Everdell (Everdell@aol.com)
Date: Sun Jun 11 2000 - 09:43:06 EDT
In a message dated 6/10/00, Jim Propp writes:
<<Have any of you actually seen David Auburn's new play "Proof"?>>
As for me, not yet, despite being so close to the theater. Thanks for the
reviews. Of course you are right about the Good Will Hunting Principle.
OTOH, "Proof" was vetted by members of the NYU Math Department, heirs of
Courant, and may well be mathematically unexceptionable. It may even have
<<struggle, the achievement of making a mathematical discovery>>. Plays
reach many who can appreciate that. In the movies, meanwhile, math is so
rare that any treatment of it, however meretricious, can have a desirable
effect on the less numerate. In the movie _IQ_, where Walter Matthau's
Einstein plays matchmaker for Meg Ryan, there is a scene in which the
infinite halvings paradox of Zeno is correctly presented, then plausibly
made into a pretext for a dance. My sixth graders one year had an easier
time learning Zeno's reasoning because they had seen the movie. In turn,
_IQ_ doubtless used Zeno because in a great many American schools, both
primary and secondary, the paradox is indeed in the curriculum. Compare
that with the movie's "nucular physics" which is completely factitious,
probably because these days a young adult audience can safely be assumed
to be ignorant of it.
Bill Everdell, Brooklyn
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