Artwork by Hadi Farahani

Math Goes Pop The American public succumbs to the allure of a formerly ‘uncool’ discipline By David Richeson and Cotten Seiler

In the Oscar-winning film Good Will Hunting (1997), the title character, employed as a custodian at MIT, steps away from his floor-buffing duties to solve a thorny problem in graph theory on a hallway chalkboard. Hunting (played by Matt Damon) conquers it with seemingly little effort and an air of indifference that affronts the internationally renowned professor who had posted the problem as a challenge to MIT’s brightest students. In Hunting’s triumph we see one component of the appeal of mathematics in popular culture—its seemingly democratic and meritocratic nature. The theorem doesn’t care if one is an acclaimed professor or a custodian; it’s ultimately about talent, specifically, whether one possesses that rare and slippery thing we call genius. The idea that genius exists across the spectrum of society has been an influential one in American society at least since Thomas Jefferson, who asserted the presence of a “natural aristocracy,” a group of intellectual elites drawn from all social classes (and, later thinkers would add, all races and genders). Will Hunting is a hero in this mold, an underdog with an innate facility for mathematical abstraction.

Other recent cinematic, theatrical and literary forays into the world of mathematics demonstrate this same fascination with the hidden talents of otherwise unassuming or eccentric individuals, though the focus has often been on tragedy. A Beautiful Mind (2002), which swept the Academy Awards, is based on the life of John Nash, a Nobel Prize winner whose career was derailed by schizophrenia. Indeed, popular culture often uses portrayals of mathematicians to explore the volatile nature of creativity and its proximity to insanity. In Pi (1998), a young man loses his grip on reality as he attempts to mathematically conquer the stock market. David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Proof (2001) offers perhaps the most realistic portrayal of mathematicians in its depiction of a young woman coming to grips with the death of her father, an accomplished mathematician suffering from dementia, and with her own undiscovered gifts. Rainman (1988) featured the character Raymond Babbitt (Dustin Hoffman), whose capacity for speedy arithmetic is shown to be a by-product of the autism that renders him emotionally inaccessible.

Cotten Seiler (right) and David Richeson are squash partners as well as writing partners at Dickinson.

Even when mathematicians’ mental health is not called into question, another stereotype prevails—that of the mathematician as social outsider, the intellectual loner, the nerd. Don DeLillo’s novel Ratner’s Star (1976) gives us the awkward child prodigy Billy Twillig, who is sent to an isolated research facility to collaborate with a team of scientists whose social gracelessness and emotional ineptitude make him seem a paragon of adjustment by comparison. The collegiate geeks in the Revenge of the Nerds series of films (1984-1994) never could have gotten their revenge without their masterful, however uncool, proficiencies in math, computers and the sciences. It could be said that the usually harmless nerd stereotype is at least partially justified: math, unlike many other fields of academic study, generally requires only a modicum of personal interaction and rewards its practitioners on the basis of their ideas alone. Yet the stereotype can go too far, with all mathematicians cast as potential Unabombers—Ted Kaczynski, after all, holds a Ph.D. in math. When one does come across a portrayal of a mathematician as a hip and levelheaded person (Jeff Goldblum’s chaos-theory expert in Jurassic Park (1993), for example), it’s generally casting against type.

The list of math-oriented pop-culture offerings goes on: it’s been celebrated and ridiculed in films such as Little Man Tate, Sneakers and Enigma, in plays such as Fermat’s Last Tango, Breaking the Code and Arcadia, in books such as Flatland, Fermat’s Enigma and Math Curse, and in the satiric world of The Simpsons. Even Barbie has gotten in on the action: Teen-Talk Barbie, produced by Mattel in the 1990s, delivers the canned line, “Math class is tough!”

Barbie’s statement understandably outraged a number of women’s groups, and Mattel has since eliminated it from her repertoire. But Barbie’s exasperation with mathematics illustrates—and perpetuates—the traditional belief that it is a masculine field. Although an increasing number of women major in mathematics and enter the profession, popular culture continues to represent math as the most “macho” of the formal studies. Russell Crowe lends a hunky presence to the portrayal of John Nash. Matt Damon’s Will Hunting proves theorems with the same masterful nonchalance as Marlon Brando displayed astride his motorcycle in The Wild One. In the film Straw Dogs (1971), Dustin Hoffman’s character’s mathematical abilities both conceal and provide a clue to the intensity that simmers beneath his mousy exterior. In Proof, the dramatic action hinges on a long-unsolved conjecture which, it turns out, is proven not by an esteemed mathematician but by his relatively untrained daughter. Even when women are portrayed as mathematicians, as in the film Antonia’s Line (1995), they often are shown as having lost their traditionally feminine qualities in their devotion to rigorous intellectual pursuits.

The appeal of mathematics to the creators and audiences of popular culture seems especially ironic in an environment in which most people are quick to express their distaste for, and even fear of, math. In the popular imagination, romantic images of the mathematician as visionary and wizardlike often compete with images of the mathematician as friendless, reclusive and maladjusted. Often overlooked is the reality that a mathematician, genius or not, must toil for years to learn the craft, just as a doctor, a writer or a mason must. Yet the perception of mathematics as an arcane and intimidating body of knowledge to which “normal” people do not have access is at least partially responsible for the romantic images of mathematicians that find their way on to the page, the stage and screens, large and small. •

David Richeson, an assistant professor of mathematics, joined the college in 2000. His research interests include dynamical systems and topology. In his free time he enjoys advising the Dickinson radio station, WDCV, and hosting his weekly radio program. Cotten Seiler, assistant professor of American studies, arrived at Dickinson this fall. A cultural historian of the 20th-century United States by training, he has been known to deliver the canned line, “Math class is tough!”