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.