Kelly Wand
3. Back to School
2. This Is Spinal Tap
Plan 9 from Outer Space
What are your favorite uses of math in the movies? Please listen to the show to hear us elaborate on ours, and hear about a gazillion listener submissions. To contribute to next week’s topic, please write us at [email protected].
Here’s my Serious Man pick Kelly Wand cruelly (albeit understandbly) cut short. I particularly love the shot of Larry dwarfed by the Uncertainty Principle equation. It’s basically the theme of the movie in a nutshell.
It’s My Turn (1980) is reasonably well-known in math circles for having a moderately convincing sketch of the proof of the snake lemma from homological algebra.
Unfortunately, the only part of the exchange with the student that really rings true is probably the last line.
Edited to add:
While watching the clip from A Serious Man, I noticed that while he’s writing on the board at about 0:15, he writes that delta-p is equal to the square root of <p>^2-<p>^2, which is of course zero… Later, at 0:44, you can see over his shoulder that the expression has been corrected to <p^2>-<p>^2! It’s got to be really hard to get all that stuff down without having much of a sense for its meaning.
By weird chance, that’s the only episode of Silicon Valley I have watched. I thought it was pretty great though, I need to catch the others.
Anyway, I only really have one that has stuck with me since I saw the movie - in Goldeneye, James Bond is given a pen that contains an explosive that is armed by clicking it three times (as demonstrated here). Later in the movie, Nightcrawler takes his pen and keeps double clicking it, then flipping it about his fingers and double clicking repeatedly. I love the bit where James is watching this happen and doing the mental arithmetic to figure out when the bomb is armed before he swats it out of his hand, blowing up the place.
In my 3x3 entry I wrote that I disagreed with the character in Pi who says, “Everything is math,” and Tom backed me up by mentioning poetry. That made me want to share these two pages from a book I’m writing:
Tom’s next example was prose, which makes me wonder if the concept of meter in poetry, studied by Hemachandra in the example I describe above, snuck into Tom’s mind, prompting him to pull back a bit to prose so that meter is no longer so important.
So basically I’m bragging that I am writing a book. Thoughts?
