Update: I originally saw this on Cafe Hayek. He found it through this blog. Of course, the movie isn't about math, not really. It's about trying for the impossible and achieving it. It's also about human tragedy.
From Marginal Revolution:
Here is one of my all time favorite documentaries, the 45 minute Fermat's Last Theorem made by Simon Singh and John Lynch for the BBC in 1996. I've watched it many times and every time I am moved by unforgettable moments.
The plainspoken Goro Shimura talking of his friend Yutaka Taniyama, "he was not a very careful person as a mathematician, he made a lot of mistakes but he made mistakes in a good direction." "I tried to imitate him," he says sadly, "but I found out that it is very difficult to make good mistakes." Shimura continues to be troubled by his friend's suicide in 1958.
2 comments:
I ended up watching the whole thing today. I loved it. It almost made me wish I were a mathematician.
I'm the math club advisor at my new school and oversee some pretty mind blowing young mathematicians. All this math exposure is making me appreciate pure mathematics more than I ever have before.
As I watched the film I thought of how theoretical scientists are often scrutinized if their work doesn't have a direct commercial application, yet this man's mathematical quest will almost certainly yield no marketable fruit (other than the film itself I guess). But it's the human element of dedication, striving, following your dreams (what little boy dreams of mathematical proofs anyway?), and overcoming obstacles that makes this story so relatable.
Then I went to tell one of my math geniuses about it. But he had already seen it.
I've seen video of Milton Friedman where he basically punts on answering whether research is a "public good."
I'd make this argument for markets over government in research: there's a market for people that are really good at math. But those people have to get good at math first. So, there's a market for teaching people to be good at math. How do you market yourself as a person who's good at teaching people how to do math? You probably solve really hard abstract math problems.
The video made me wish I had studied math, too.
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