BRADY HARAN: So good Will
Hunting in the film is a troubled mathematical genius. And he solved this problem
on the blackboard. There are a few candidates for
the real Will Hunting. Shall we talk about them? Will Hunting solves
this problem. There is an urban legend that's
similar of a student who ran into his exam late. And he copied down the problem
from the board, and he went and solved them. And the last one seemed
really hard, but he kept working on it. And he managed to
solve it, and he handed in his exam paper. And then the professor rings
him that night saying, you were only meant to do the
first few problems. The last one was an unsolvable
problem. Oh, you've solved it! So that's an urban legend. Great thing about that
is that it happened. So the real story of that
is there was a guy called George Dantzig. He was a Ph.D. Mathematician. And it wasn't an exam. It was a lecture. He went into his lecture, and he
copied down the homework on the board, these two problems. And he went home and
solved them. And he handed them in, and it
did seem harder than usual. And his professor went,
oh, just throw it onto the desk, will you? The professor-- and this is what happened,
apparently. This is the true story. This is how he tells it-- wakes him up six weeks later
banging on his door, 8 o'clock in the morning on a Sunday
morning, saying, can I write the introduction
to your paper? He goes, what paper? He goes, those two problems
you solved were unsolved statistical problems
that you've done. And this is the first he's
ever heard of it. This actually happened. George Dantzig was his name. A year later when he had to pick
his Ph.D. topic, he asked his professor what
he should do. And his professor said, oh, just
put those two problems in a binder, and we'll call
that your thesis. Maybe you have to have done a
Ph.D. to understand how much I hate him right now. So that's one candidate for the
real good Will Hunting. There's another famous possible
candidate for this. There was a guy called
William Sidis. Now he was an American
guy who was a child genius, a child prodigy. They said he had an
IQ of over 250. And at the age of 11, he was
giving a lecture at Harvard for the Harvard mathematicians
on some sort-- He was touted as he will
grow up to be a great mathematician someday. He got into trouble
as a young man. He carried the red flag
at a Communist rally. And so he was arrested. And he was arrested for
assaulting a policeman. And part of his bail-- INTERVIEWER: You hit
a cop, you go down. BRADY HARAN: Yeah! Yeah, that's right. And if you're a Communist
as well. So part of his bail was to get
a job as a technician at MIT, which is kind of like Will
Hunting, and to see a psychologist. And the psychologist that he had
to see was his own father, who put him in a private asylum
for a whole year, which he called mental torture. When he came out, he pretty
much swore off academia, mathematics, and spent the
rest of his life taking clerical work, office jobs,
working the adding machines. He found it relaxing. He quite liked the adding
machines, but swore off mathematics for the
rest of his life. It's possible that the story of
William Sidis that I just told may have influenced Matt
Damon, because they were both Harvard people. So Matt Damon went to
Harvard as well. And so it's a famous story,
and he was a very famous child prodigy. So it's quite possible. But in the film, what they
reference is Ramanujan. Ramanujan was this famous
Indian clerk. I have talked about him before,
but I'll tell his story properly this time. He was a mathematical genius,
again, because where he was in India, he had very limited
mathematical education. He only had a couple of maths
textbooks to work from. And only from this, he was able
to reinvent a whole bunch of mathematical results
by his own. He dropped out of college,
because he was so obsessed with his maths he was failing
his other subjects. And he had to take a
job in an office. He sent his mathematical results
to some Cambridge mathematicians including
Hardy, who realized how important, how amazing
it was, and invited him over to Cambridge. If you want to understand the
relationship between the professor in the film and Will
Hunting, then well, what I've got here is a quote from
Hardy about Ramanujan. I think it's an important quote,
and I think it will explain what's happening
in the film. So if I may read it from here. He said-- So that's what Hardy thought
about Ramanujan. And you have to remember this. If you see the film, this is how
the professor feels about Will Hunting. When they're at loggerheads,
when he's so concerned about his career, it's because there
is the sense that mathematics is a young man's game. This is how Hardy felt
about Ramanujan. This is how the professor in
the film feels about Will Hunting as well. So another big thing in the
film is the Fields Medal. The professor in the film is a
Fields Medal winner, if I get that right. And they make a big
deal of it. They call it the Nobel
Prize of mathematics, which is kind of true. They give four of these medals
every four years. And it is a big deal in maths. There is no Nobel Prize
in mathematics. The rumor that goes around
maths departments is that Nobel didn't like
mathematicians. There's the story that his
wife ran off with a mathematician. Which is not true, because
he was a bachelor, and he wasn't married. So it isn't true at all. He just didn't value maths. He was interested in physics and
chemistry, and he wasn't interested in maths. That's why there is no Nobel
Prize in biology. INTERVIEWER: When you watch
"Good Will Hunting", does it make you feel good about
mathematics? BRADY HARAN: Yeah. INTERVIEWER: Is it good for
mathematics, that film? BRADY HARAN: Yeah. Because what it does,
is it shows-- well, first of all, it shows mathematicians as human beings. They're not portrayed as nerdy
stereotypes, awkward, or socially awkward or anything
like that. They're just guys with a job. And that's what we are. We are just guys with a job. We're good at our job. What's wrong with that? And there are genuine
personalities in there. You've got the young
mathematician who doesn't appreciate what he's got. There's the Ph.D. student
who's jealous of all the attention Will Hunting
is getting. We've got the professor who is
a regular guy, even though he's highly regarded in his
field and he's a very important mathematician,
fictional though he is. He's a regular guy. He has his own problems. He has his own weaknesses. And it does show that
we are human.
