A Movie You Can Count On

QUOTE/UNQUOTE "One thing I don't think a war with Iraq will do would be to provide much stimulus to the economy. Even in a bad, prolonged conflict the amount of material used up is relatively small." —TUCK PROFESSOR ANDREW BERNARD IN THE FEBRUARY 16 BOSTON GLOBE

WHEN MOST OF US FIRST SAW Good Will Hunting, we laughed, we cried, and we wondered why Matt Damon had so many moles on his chest. But when Dan Rockmore, professor of math and computer science at Dartmouth, saw the film, he got mad as hell. And he decided he wasn't going to take it anymore.

"Everyone was making a fuss over what a great math movie it was," he says. "It was an entertaining movie, but it wasn't about math. And it just fed all the usual stereotypes of mathematicians—that we are all arrogant geniuses, and that it's basically an innate talent. That nothing is learned. It either comes to you or it doesn't."

Rockmore determined to make a movie of his own—a video documentary that would show what mathematicians are really like. He secured a $120,000 grant from the National Science Foundation and enlisted the aid of Dartmouth filmmakers Bob Drake and Wendy Conquest. They traveled to New York, Los Angeles and Boston to interview math professors. The end result is The Math Life, a 40-minute discussion of major math topics from the surprisingly articulate mouths of the numbercrunchers themselves. It's one part math-major recruiting video, one part "I'm not a freak" self-help homily.

"Mathematicians are usually a little quirky, but most of them are a lot of fun to have a beer with," Rockmore says, a little defensively.

The Math Life played to a packed house in Loew Auditorium last summer. It was acquired by Rhode Island Public Television for broadcast (tentatively scheduled for April) and Rockmore expects it to air on other public television stations.

So, does Rockmore feel the need to live up to the success of the most recent popular math movie, the Oscar-winning A Be dutiful Mind?. Phooey on director Ron Howard, Rockmore says.

"I think what bothered me the most was this notion that when John Nash was ill he was solving all these hard problems," he says. "In fact, he did all of his work before schizophrenia came out in him. This idea that he was having delusions and working successfully simultaneously, that he actually needed the delusions in order to work—well, I think that's a terrible thing to tell people."

A tough critic, this Rockmore. So, is there any math movie out there that he actually likes?

"I liked Pi (a surreal indie drama about a mathematician who goes insane). There's this guy, he's interested in trying to figure out the patterns in pi. He has some idea that maybe it's related to chaos. A person working in chaos theory will look at the world in a certain way—the cream being stirred into coffee as another pattern in chaos theory, for instance. So I think in the context of somebody working on chaos, and seeing so many different things in the world in that way, it's a good movie. Unfortunately, he goes crazy because he can't stop thinking about chaos theory, and he drills a hole in his head. Which is not the message that you really want to send about mathematicians."

Reel Numbers Filmmakers Bob Drakeand Wendy Conquest teamed with mathprof Dan Rockmore to film The Math Life.