I like when mathematics (as well as the hard sciences) is positively portrayed in media. Shows like Num3rs and MathNet (I’m dating myself) are good examples for illustrating that mathematics isn’t just this subject that people learn so they can teach it. But as is the case with any area of expertise that has to be depicted for the masses, there will be caricatures and stereotypes. Depending on the theme (comedy, tragedy, horror, etc.), the caricatures for the same profession amplify the good, the bad, or the ugly side. For example, perhaps in a romantic comedy, the artist would be portrayed as the happy-go-lucky, colorful (hair and clothing), easy-to-get-along-with individual for whom things just work out. But in, say, a darker film, the artist would be a brooding, misunderstood, recluse working with grays and matted blues — and even here, I display my social conditioning in associating “artist” with “painter”. This is similarly true for scientists, either they are erudite with British accents working in such fields as “biological altruism” (see the Keanu Reeves version of “The Day the Earth Stood Still”) or they are the mad professor / scientist hell-bent on some form of cosmic conquest. Or, as in the case of Jurassic Park, there’s good science and evil science at play.

Now don’t get me wrong, there’s a story that the filmmakers are trying to tell. And to tell a story, in a convincing, and consistent manner there is a lot of work that goes into not just the casting for the roles but also into the dialogue, how the dialogue is spoken, the clothes the individuals wear, their environment (professors (or Lex Luthor (Gene Hackman style)), for example, could be in a home library with filled bookcases), etc. So the caricatures are natural and welcome because they help with the story-telling.

An example of this is the recent Superman movie, Man of Steel (spoilers in this paragraph). At some point the lead government scientist concludes that the Kryptonians are terraforming Earth. To help the audience understand what terraforming is, the cadet in the room asks what terraforming is. The scientist responds in typical big-science-y word gobble-dee-goo and the military general translates it into “plain English”. The roles are obvious, the scientist is smart. He speaks quickly with a sophisticated vocabulary that when parsed actually can mean something relevant. Got it. The general is also smart, but he’s people smart. He can relate to the masses. He’s the approachable one. The cadet, well, we’re the cadet, asking our simple question and wanting a simple answer. But the question is unknowingly complicated, thus the general can’t answer it. The scientist, however, can answer it, but doesn’t know how to speak to us simpletons. In comes the general, the mediator, the translator, the friend of the people to show us the light. And so a formula for character development goes.

Formula! Yes! Natural segue. Mathematics is about formulas, right? Meh. My understanding of the public understanding of what mathematics is / what a mathematician does, is as follows: “Oh you’re a mathematician. So you can calculate really quickly the square root of 234, right?”, “Oh you’re a mathematician, so where do you teach?”, “In mathematics there’s only one right answer.”, “Mathematics is about solving an equation.”, etc. It is true that there are mathematicians who can compute quickly. It is true that there exist mathematicians who teach. It is also true that in some areas of mathematics that there is an equation to solve and that the solution is unique. But all of these things are part of the mechanics of mathematics.

There’s another part in the world of mathematics that deals with thoughts and philosophy and meaning and all that type of stuff. The type of stuff that people generally wouldn’t associate with mathematics. Some classic questions raised by mathematicians that can crossover into the theological are questions regarding the nature of infinity (see Georg Cantor, for example). Are there different “levels of infinity”? Is it possible to say that one set is “more infinite” than another? Does that even make sense?

It’s questions like these and the people associated with them that makes for interesting story-telling. Ramanujan is a fascinating individual in this light. His story is actually a story worth telling and making a movie out of — his story has to be told.

Ramanujan made some impressive contributions to mathematics. Some of his more notable ones (read: good for story-telling) are identities like this one.

$$\sum_{k=0}^{\infty} \frac{(-1)^{k}(4k + 1)[(2k-1)!!]^{3}}{[(2k)!!]^{3}} = \frac{2}{\pi}$$

How did \(\pi\) find itself in this expression?

These are the wonderful formulas that fill movie chalkboards and fascinate us because of all the familiar but unfamiliar symbolism. We know (ahem: conditioned to believe) that math is “hard” and when telling a story, what better way to maintain that view by displaying something that looks hard?

Another way to feed into the mysticism of mathematics is to show equations like this

$$e^{i\pi} + 1 = 0$$

This is a classic example of a “simple” looking equation using letters and symbols familiar to the general public with the right-hand side displaying a zero (the “left-hand side” is the side that is to the left of the equal sign, the “right-hand side” is the side that is to the right of the equal sign, the equal sign takes no sides since it is defining a relationship between the two “sides”). The zero stares back at the reader and begs the question, “how did the left-hand side equal zero?”.

I can like this for story-telling; it draws us in and makes us wonder about what other mysteries exist. And for this I can suspend my disbelief when there are two movie mathematicians furiously writing equations on a blackboard in a dueling banjos kind of fashion. I’m ok with the Num3rs mathematician taking an excessively long (cinematic) time to come up with “Markov Chains!” and then whiz-banging out a near impossible calculation with beautiful accompanying graphics in no time. That’s TV storytelling. I’ll deal with it.

The part that I dread is the human side of the story-telling. What is a mathematician? How do mathematicians act? What are they like? As if there’s a stereotypical psychology associated with the profession (any profession for that matter). Maybe there is. I don’t know. I can converse with my math buddies a lot more easily than, say, my non-math buddies, but that has less to do with psychology and more to do with similarity in language. While I speak English with everyone, certain concepts and ideas are more easily conveyed to math friends than to non-math friends because it’s easier to relate certain concepts in math speak.

A non-math example is the word “schadenfreude“. In not so many words, this one word captures a lot of emotion. In the absence of knowing this word, how would we convey “schadenfreude”? We would probably have to relate it by giving some dark example that the listener can relate to. Similarly, the precision in math speak allows for an “easier” conversation in some instances.

Here’s a math example. I had to explain the rules to some card game to a fellow mathematician. One of the rules was about the restrictions on how to play cards. In effect, cards had to be played in numerically increasing order. The next card played could be of equal or greater value than the previous card played, but couldn’t be lower. For example, “1 1 2 4 4 4 8” would be acceptable as would “1 2 3 4 6 8 9”, but “1 2 1 3 4 4 5” would not be allowed. And this is a mouthful. The math speak explanation? “Play cards in monotonically increasing order, not strictly monotonic.” No further explanation or examples are necessary. (It is true that I don’t need to say the “not strictly monotonic” part, but I added it for emphasis.)

And maybe there is a term within linguistics that explains this and I could’ve just stated that instead of having to write two paragraphs explaining it.

What’s the consequence of speaking this way? To the “outsider”, it may as well be a foreign language. And some reactions (not the only) to that which is foreign can be fear, distrust / mistrust, hate, us vs them, etc. Of course, some other reactions to that which is foreign can be curiosity, interest, excitement, exoticism, etc. In any case, this, to me, gives a beginning for “good” and “bad” stereotypes.

When “A Beautiful Mind” came out there was a definite imprint that was left on the minds of viewers of the out-of-this-worldness of mathematicians — the genius mathematician prone to hallucinations who solved problems in his own beautiful world where the problems existed. But the world that actually physically existed, the reality that we all knew, didn’t have any of these problems. To me that’s a larger metaphor for the perception that mathematicians are somehow only interested in solving problems that don’t really matter or exist. And for this, I am saddened by how mathematicians are often portrayed in TV and film — and here I emphasize mathematicians as people not necessarily the mathematics that they “do”.

Mathematicians are portrayed as savants, strangers in a familiar land, fluent in a language only familiar to other savants like themselves, dealing with the demons of the mind, burdening their loved ones with their visions (real or imagined), and misunderstood / pitied by their loved ones.

It’s not just the portrayal in the movie or show that saddens me, it’s what people actually take with them and leave in their minds. When I had mentioned that I wanted to pursue a PhD in Mathematics, it was right around when “A Beautiful Mind” came out. And people’s reactions were inane comments like “You definitely have a beautiful mind.”, “Don’t go nuts.”, “Ah, so you will date ugly women?” (for those who don’t remember, there’s a bar scene whereby through some game-theoretic logic, our hero mathematician solves the “dating” problem — a problem that seems to afflict mathematicians more than any other group apparently — furthering the “foreigner” archetype), etc. This is probably all playful banter, but there are those instances when it isn’t.

This, above all, is what I dread about the Ramanujan movie, “The Man Who Knew Infinity”. How will Ramanujan be portrayed? How will Hardy be portrayed? How will mathematicians, in general, come out? Will this film take us through a dizzying array of mathematics only to simultaneously show Ramanujan shivering in a drafty London bedroom because he can’t figure out how to use a blanket? Will Ramanujan be the genius mathematician rivaled by his equally genius failings in social decorum? Will he be yet another example of the beyond-this-world intelligence who looks at a fork and knife curiously?

What of Hardy? How much of Hardy’s character will be pulled and then amplified for the sake of story-telling from his “A Mathematician’s Apology”? Hardy, in some sense, is a great character for story-telling a mathematician’s tale since he had a very definitive stance on what mathematics is and what mathematicians are. So I will be very curious as to how he will be depicted through today’s lens.

What about the Hardy-Ramanujan relationship? How will that be shown? Will it be in the “cadet-scientist-general” model of “Joe Armchair Mathematician-Ramanujan-Hardy”? Will it be a Batman and Robin relationship? Or will it be a relationship of equals with different strengths? Or will it be like Takuan and Musashi (from Eiji Yoshikawa’s amazing novel(s) “Musashi” — Takuan was the polished (yet unpolished), Zen Buddhist monk, advisor to many heads of state in feudal Japan and guide, mentor, and friend of Musashi; Musashi was the legendary, undefeated Japanese swordsman who learned the way of the sword through self-study (the real Musashi wrote “The Book of Five Rings”).)?

Or the one that I dread, will it be a British Hardy and an Indian Ramanujan where the emphasized differences will be cultural / racial above all else?

And how much of the cultural / racial backgrounds will be emphasized? Will mathematics be just a backdrop? Or will it be the other way around? Or something else altogether? How will India be depicted? And the British? How will they be shown?

How will mathematicians come out at the end of this movie? More appreciated and admired? Or further pushed to the edges of society understood only as “smart and odd and somehow necessary for society’s benefit, but their absence wouldn’t be missed because society doesn’t understand how much it relies on mathematics and mathematicians”?

There are many ways to make this movie an absolute insult to mathematicians and there are many ways to really show one of the most amazing stories of a man whose contributions may never had been able to grace humanity had it not been for another man seeing past the biases of the time and reading the original letter filled with brilliant mathematics the way any person should — with an open and unassuming mind.