Mathematician Jordan Ellenberg breaks down Math films & TV shows

and i'm hoping that one of you might prove it by the end of the semester but it's an advanced fourier system that's not a thing also one of you might prove it you don't prove a system you prove a theorem all right i'm already mad we've only watched this for like three seconds i'm jordan ellenberg i'm a mathematician and a professor at the university of wisconsin-madison and the author of the new book shape and i am here to break down some math scenes in film and tv [Music] okay so we just saw on the blackboard if you want to know where the math joke is there uh purported claim that one number to the 12th power is another number to the 12th power plus a third number to the 12th power which would be a counter example of the fairmont's last theorem one of the most famous conjectures in all of number theory so the joke is here is that homer has inadvertently disproved uh one of the most famous questions of number theory i would say the uh the blackboard writing was pretty good and actually there are tons of former mathematicians on the simpsons writing staff j stuart burns who graded my algebra homework and my first year of college later became a simpsons writer and then the head writer on on futurama and i actually think the moment in which he erases a less than sign and replaces it with a greater than sign messing up inequalities is a super common minor mistake with big consequences that mathematicians make all the time so um i'm actually gonna give that one like a nine out of ten for realism and explosions and generally being funny thank you steven i also put an advanced fourier system on the main hallway chalkboard and i'm hoping that one of you might prove it by the end of the semester what is an advanced fourier system that's not a thing also one of you might prove it you don't prove a system you prove a theorem all right i'm already mad we've only watched this for like three seconds person to do so will not only be my good graces but also go on to fame and fortune by having their accomplishment recorded and the name printed i'm just stopping until i can look at the blackboard and the blackboard actually looks pretty good i see the abbreviation iff which is very realistic it means if and only if something we say a lot in math but it takes a long time to write out in chalk so we write iff and i see that there [Music] i don't really get why there would be a blackboard in the hall and everybody just like walks up to it at the same time somehow he was talking about fourier analysis in his class on the blackboard and then now there's a problem that seems to be about graph theory which is a completely different branch of mathematics so this is a very famous scene and i'm going to be honest with you this is the first time i have ever seen it because from the way it was described i knew i would find it annoying and you know what it is annoying i was right you did this to me it made me watch this after my whole life of never having seen it i don't know there's like no attempt to make the math realistic there's this kind of absurd idea of what it means to prove a big theorem he's excited that they're going to be published in the mit tech like the student newspaper like that's what's exciting about proving a big theorem nothing about this was good three out of ten that's my rating 442. i just want to speak to the soundtrack by the way this kind of music is surprisingly good for sort of creating like a mathematical frame of mind and i do sometimes listen to music like this in order to kind of achieve math brain major contribution the golden ratio okay that was like a sort of funny mess up he wrote a is to be as a is to a plus b and he means as a plus b is to a because if a is to b as a is to a plus b that would mean that b and a plus b were the same which would mean that a was zero which is i think not what he means to say with the same unique ratio the squaring can contin i'm gonna tell you a funny story which is that i had a friend in college got into the film industry after we graduated one point she said i want you to have lunch with a friend of mine because he wants to make a movie about math he's out there for a long time just talking about the mathematical life anyway that guy was darren aronofsky he at the time was sort of like trying to launch his career as a filmmaker and what we're watching here is his first movie and i do not remember what i told him about what the mathematical life was like i don't think it was that much like this remember davinci artist inventor sculptor naturalist rediscovered the balanced perfection of the golden rectangle and penciled it also no longer believed that da vinci was interested in the golden golden ratio or used it as a model for his art by the way pythagoras loved this shape for he found it everywhere in nature the nautilus shell ram's horns whirlpools tornadoes our fingerprints our dna and even our milky way there's no way pythagoras knew the shape of the milky way though by the way just so you know i think those equations at the end were completely random and had nothing to do with what he was talking about i think the last one might have been q expansions of modular forms went by pretty fast this movie as a depiction of math i would actually give a seven out of ten there's a lot i like about it this particular scene i think focuses on the parts of it where it misses the mark a bit so i'll give the scene a 4 out of 10. the taranis are doesn't have any set patterns or park schedules the essence of chaos i'm still not clear on chaos this is of course every mathematician's dream that like the movie star in the front seat actually asks you to explain your research instead of you just deciding to do it the the orientation of the hairs on your hands hey ellen look at this um the amount of blood just first of all i'll just say that i actually i mean this is a great acting moment from jeff goldblum i feel like he exactly captures like a certain uncomfortable way that some people like to explain things uncomfortably real uncomfortably real the math itself is not bad i mean chaos technically is not exactly the same thing as unpredictability but is actually central to the idea of chaotic dynamics so if you had to do it in this much time that's about as well as you can do so one interesting thing about this is the us military got really really into chaos theory primarily the interest a lot of it was driven by the popularity of this movie and you know the idea oh a butterfly flaps his rings in one way instead of another and then there's a tsunami like across the globe and the way you're supposed to think of this mathematically is like wow long-range predictions are really hard and there might actually be mathematical reasons they are impossible beyond a certain time horizon i think when the military heard oh if a butterfly flaps its wings in a certain way there could be a tsunami around the globe their reaction was get me that butterfly exactly the wrong way to think about it mathematically i would give this an 8 out of 10 i feel like they didn't try to do too much they didn't like flash equations on the screen that had nothing to do with the subject they just kind of stuck to having a sort of basic quick layperson's explanation extra credit for goldblum i think doing a very good job of conveying a certain type of mathematician like i would believe that he talked to a bunch of mathematicians while figuring out how to act this role [Music] so using this equation in the upper left right here so i'm just going to stop right here because that is the pythagorean equation of baseball i love i haven't seen this movie so i love it that's in there i was like obsessed when i learned about this when i was like 13 or 14. the fundamental idea that if you know how many runs a team scored and how many runs they allowed just from that information you could predict pretty accurately how many games they would win how many games you would lose it's somehow at the absolute heart of the discipline of sabermetrics which is the study of baseball statistics so popular in the united states that it has its own name that is indeed exactly the kind of thing that in the early history of statistical analysis of baseball somebody would have been explaining on a whiteboard to be like no you actually need to pay attention to this people are overlooked for a variety of biased reasons and perceived flaws bill james and mathematics cut straight through that yeah so the name check is right there you see bill james's run created formula he might have mentioned john thorne too and pete palmer i think those three people would have been the people who were out in the wilderness saying baseball teams actually ought to be thinking about these numbers of the 20 000 notable players for us to consider i believe that there is a championship team of 25 people that we could afford yeah i mean i love this because this is like literally me during the baseball season like following my team and looking at sheets that look just like this this is not higher math right in some sense the whole message of this movie you don't have to develop like ultra new high test impossibly difficult math uh in order to do better than anybody else was actually pretty basic just like sort of making some spreadsheets and counting the right things instead of the wrong things i'm going to give this a 9 out of 10. it doesn't set out to do too much but what it does it does up perfectly accurately [Music] i'll just comment that you see like one of the best functions the riemann zeta function written on the glass in this scene the sum of you can't see it on on the clip but i can tell you what's below the sigma it's the sum from i equals one and then above it to infinity which is absolutely central to number theory physics like all kinds of all kinds of things so it's certainly something that nash might have been thinking about this is a bit weird because it looks like again i'm reading backwards but the top line looks sort of like something in ring theory or algebra he has some kind of a ring modulo and ideal and then below it he has something that looks a little bit more like something from physics so i would be curious to know like who wrote you know when math movies are made they will have a mathematician prepare stuff to be on the board or even on set to like sort of oversee what's on the blackboards to make sure that it's correct i believe i can prove that galway extensions are covering spaces the gowai extensions for covering spaces was understood by growth and deak in the 60s so they are talking about real math but it was not something an enterprising grad student figured out in the late 70s in princeton it was something that by that time would have been kind of well known to plenty of people in that building the book of beautiful mind is fantastic a wonderful book that really captures a lot about the sort of rich sociology of mathematics and i think is a very sensitive treatment of somebody's struggle with mental illness uh the movie is kind of a cartoon of all that it's not a great movie to be honest either in its depiction of math or it's or in its depiction of schizophrenia i am gonna give this scene i would say a five out of ten because i think they did make some effort at the math words being realistic but i don't think they really made any attempts to have any math take place and they could have done more to make it more realistic i see you're looking at a little problem so what's happening here let me give you a little background is that the professor in an attempt to show up this child prodigy has intentionally given her a problem with a sign error in it [Music] okay so one thing that might not be obvious about this shot you're looking at right now is that i'm in it but i'm off screen you can't see me i was on this set while this scene was being shot i'll also say in terms of writing on the board um that this uh this young actor mckenna grace she memorized all the stuff that needed to go on the board and she wrote it so you can imagine that with all the cuts they could have had somebody else write it and just had a few close-up shots of her chalk on the board but in fact like the sort of whole stuff that's on the board she memorized it all for n congruent to four mod five the answer is a multiple of five okay so now you're seeing an incredibly realistic depiction of a professor giving a number theory lecture because of course it's me while i was on set here i say something wrong i say something about something being something modulo 5 that means you divide by 5 and then i go on to say that that means it's divisible by 7 and what i realized is that i think to make it all fit into the scene and have the cup be in the right place i think they cut two different pieces of audio together apparently nobody has noticed this so honestly i think this mistake is like not too bad it pretty much went under the radar for the world so a penguin uk exclusive revealed here for the first time i will say here's the thing this movie is mostly not about math and in the moment where there was one line of dialogue where the sign and the equation on the blackboard was referred to incorrectly and i brought this up with the director and sort of to my surprise they stopped everything they asked me what should the line say and then a mechanic grace learned a new line and they just like redid it so again everybody you know dozens of people like everybody stops they're like we're not going to have it come out um with this line wrong so i was i'm pretty impressed uh by their commitment to accuracy so i'm going to give this one a 9 out of 10. you know one does not usually watch 10 math movies in a row so it's interesting to sort of compare and contrast and see the way they play off each other i think for best actorly portrayal of somebody doing math i think i'm gonna give it to jeff goldblum i think he was the one who i most felt might have sort of spent a long time studying mathematicians and truly trying to give off a mathematician vibe i think in general people don't even know that a mathematician is a thing that in 2021 you can be i think for a lot of people and partly because for for reasons of necessity the math that we teach in school is math that's pretty old a lot of people think the mathematicians like all like are long dead people who wore robes that's thing that people need to know so if not every equation on the blackboard is right or not every word is said exactly the way i would say it i think it's like a big much bigger inaccuracy to believe that math is finished and something that happened a long time ago and i think every movie about a living working contemporary mathematician does a lot of work to correct that inaccuracy thanks for watching my new book shape is available in hardback ebook and audio at the link in the description 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Channel: Penguin Books UK

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Keywords: Penguin, Penguin Books, Penguin Books UK, math break down, jordan ellenberg, jordan ellenberg gifted, jordan ellenberg interview, break it down maths, the simpsons math, the simpsons math joke, good will hunting reaction, good will hunting math, math films, math films reaction, math professor reacts, moneyball math, a beautiful mind math, expert breaks down math movies, penguin break it down, professor breaks down math movies, movies about math, jordan ellenberg shape

Id: oejBbQx-Sqo

Length: 15min 13sec (913 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 07 2021