Mathematician Jordan Ellenberg breaks down Math films & TV shows 

My wife loved Jordan's book "Shape". Partner of a mathematician is a great target audience. What Jordan is doing here is difficult. There is a long tradition of shining high-minded snark on popular depictions of mathematics; see for example the writings of Dan Rockmore. This genre is constrained in the same way as "conservative columnist" for WaPo, for one's conclusions need to satisfy a particular audience, and are mostly predetermined. When we read math papers, we use all of our powers to deduce what the author intended. That’s not the stance here. I was the math guy for ABM. Not the first; the creative team could not reach an understanding with my dapper predecessor on how to balance the needs of math and cinema. My profession is ill-equipped to help here, for our only fiction writing experience is grant proposals. Until Nash's breakdown, much of the math is taken from his papers. For example, in grad school Nash used all 24 Greek letters in a paper. As luck would have it, a widely circulated publicity still showed Russell Crowe staring through his dorm window with "0 < pi < 1" scrawled on the glass. Anyone who imagines that math requires great flexibility of mind would be dismayed to learn that mathematicians can be cripplingly conventional. This photo bothered colleagues who could only imagine "pi" meaning, well, "pi". A hilarious UC Berkeley email exchange wondered if the math consultant was trying to make Russell look stupid. I edited an interview on the DVD extras where Nash proudly explains this use of the Greek alphabet. During Nash's recovery, the filmmakers asked that the math be a fictionalized approach to the Riemann Hypothesis. Nash himself asked me about the porch clipboard, a novel notation for continued fractions. In the library scene here, the blackboard is adapted from famous related work in the 1960s. Nash is being generous with the grad student who missed the memo on covering spaces. I had this exact conversation with Barry Mazur when I saw this connection between my courses at Harvard. Barry simply responded with utter joy, "It's all connected!" As a failed painter, my favorite scene would be the board Nash erases. Before ABM, math in media was always four lines like a physics T-shirt. After ABM, one sees math as Jackson Pollock in ads everywhere.

I like how the simpsons leaves math jokes for people like him and the dynamite gag for people like me.

This is a really good idea by Penguin. Having the authors talk about their passion is a much better advertisement for their work than just talking about the book. If the author is interesting, we will want to read what they wrote. This guy was interesting.

This guy taught my discrete mathematics course 12 years ago. Best math lecturer I ever had!

I love how Jordan saw that A is to B mistake in Pi for what it was supposed to be. Aronofsky admits this very mistake in the directors commentary.

IMO, Jeff Goldblum is always the best part of any movie he's in.

I am extremely surprised about how much mathmaticians are involved in the movie industry.

I mean I totally love these "An expert rates different movie scenes regarding their field of expertise"-videos, but an expert saying that a movie scene is inaccurate and HE IS IN THE SCENE HIMSELF blows my mind. Even though I work in media and worked on fictional movies and understand how this stuff happens, it still blows my mind. Incredible :D

"Get me that butterfly!" Comedy gold. 🦋

It’s been 10 seconds and I already like this guy

One interesting thing that A Beautiful Mind did get right is that 90% of hallucinations are auditory-only, and visual ones almost always start as auditory. Any time one of his hallucination characters appear, they're always heard off-screen first; they call out to him and then the camera turns and we see them.

LOVE this guy. With all his hyperactive energy and passion he kind of reminds me of Richard Dreyfus in Jaws.

I’m not mathematician but if they displayed math “perfectly accurately” wouldn’t that earn a 10/10 lol.

I found it funny how Jordan says mathematicians make mistakes with greater than (>) and less than (

It was very interesting to listen to this professor talking in a foreign language

McKenna Grace is quite literally gifted in anything. Doing college already, plays a dozen instruments, is an amazingly skilled actress, can apparently sing now too and that she memorized the stuff in the movie Gifted proved that even more.

Loved this - part 2 please!

I wondered what he thinks of the CBS show Numb3rs. That had mathematician advisors and was reported to be well received by other mathematicians.

It’s too bad that Good Will Hunting couldn’t get the math right. It’s a great movie. I would be interesting if there was some theory that we still haven’t proven to this day and Will managed to prove it over a weekend. I think if you are like me and didn’t even pay much attention to what was on the blackboard you would have liked the movie.

Jill Clayburgh teaches the Snake Lemma in It's My Turn. My algebra professor showed this scene as he was beginning his lecture on it.

Pi is one of the best movies ever made and quite possibly the best soundtrack ever!

@4:00 Additionally, at some point in the movie, when Max is explaining what the golden ratio is to Lenny Mayer, Max says that the golden ratio is represented by the greek letter Theta, when in fact, it is represented by Phi.

Penguin Books branching into RU-vid videos sounds like a joke from Bojack Horseman...

The explanations of chaos theory in Jurassic Park the book are tons better than how it's presented in the movie. At least in my opinion

Such a lovely video. Thank you for this! Simply, a learned something new :)

3:50 i think i just had a stroke 🫠

I think something that was missed by almost everyone is that the very final question the girl asks in Pi is 'what is 748 divided by 238'. This is the familiar 22/7 approximation of pi with both numerator and denominator multiplied by 34. Either the film maker getting in a final secret plug for the star constant, or more darkly, too much of a coincidence and an indication that drilling his head didn't work and he is only imagining he woke up back in the real world. When in actual fact he is still unconscious/dying and his sub-conscious is still fixated on Pi.

Took number theory from Prof. Ellenberg at Princeton as a freshman in 2008. Great lecturer, awesome dude!

Loved this video, the topic, the guy giving his opinion, the movies/scenes that they picked, excellent combination.

Does this guy has his own channel? I'm only 3 minutes in and already a big fan!

I have absolutely no idea what he's talking about but I absolutely love how excited he is. ❤

Proud to say that I knew about a few things he talked about. Unfortunately I'm not going any further than that in mathematics haha.

This was great...interesting, lively, fun. Someone posted they would like to have the TV show "Numbers" evaluated; and I'd love to have Jordan review a few clips from "The Big Bang Theory" ("Would you like to do the math?" "Yes, I think I would like to do the math.")

I used to love maths. This guy has all my respect.

Kudos for including Pi, an underrated movie with an amazing soundtrack!

Honestly, I can't even understand the math they're teaching my kids in school these days. It's completely different than what I learned. This was great

i love that comment about the US Military being like 'get me that butterfly' lol so emblematic of a powerful figure/institution trying to co-opt something they don't understand

Also, re "A Beautiful Mind," I know from folks who work at Princeton University, and from meeting John Nash a couple of times . . . that well, let's say Ron Howard's priority was delivering an enjoyable, understandable story. Absolute accuracy was a bit lower on the list.

There's also a super brief moment with some impressively good math in season 2 of I Think You Should Leave! It flashes on the screen for a second during the Capital Room sketch.

11:22 right after in the same scene the guy goes on to say: _‘...the functor is in the two categories,’_ which is pretty irritating too. And Russell Crowe goes: ‘mm-hmm!’ 😆😆😆

This is missing the greatest maths scene in TV/Movie history... Season 1 Finale of Silicon Valley!

@1:32 - Doesn't Homer replace the "greater than" sign with a "less than" sign?

Loved the movie Gifted! On the first watch I did a double take when I saw Jordan in it haha

If another video is made, I would love to see 'Stand and Deliver' looked at.

This guy should have a show. Charming, funny, smart. But what about the film Proof?!

This guy is ruthless. Love it!

Loved this so much! Can you do another one that covers math in high school movies? It's always so random!

10:10 the first line is just an affine variety or something. The second line is some kind of L-function? N hat as in a completed norm and d the index of ideal q?

As a child i wanted to be a mathematician or a game artist. I kept being told mathematician wasnt a real job and id never make it in the gameart world that eventually i just gave up. Mostly cause i couldnt afford college and stuff by myself when my mother refused to pay. So now i just toil away at a job i dont really like. Getting paid a little bit over 15$ and doing art on the side. Wish i could go back and encourage younger me and tell myself what i needed in order to be able to do what i actually wanted. Envourage your kids to pursue their dreams, they can always do a job they dont like as nuch if they fail, but its so much harder trying to reach what you love after you're stuck

D'yall watch that video where it shows the Golden Ration is not, in fact, everywhere in nature?

Wow, a true mathematician! I think he gave a score of 6 or lower to everyone except himself, (9 out of 10).

"It's perfect, i'll give it a 9 out of 10." Someone's math isn't quite right.

The Adjacency problem or matrix is way easier than how it is presented in the film. The branches aren’t really that difficult to figure out

I would have liked to have seen the movie stills held on screen for longer while Jordan was talking, but I enjoyed this video.

Would love to see Prof Ellenberg break down the Imitation Game.

1:27 I ain't no mathematician but I'm pretty sure Homer replaces the greater than sign with the less than sign, not the other way around...🤷‍♂

I love that he's annoyed by Good Will Hunting. I'd felt exactly the same when I watched it.

The funny thing is that Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park is playing the same Jeff Goldblum character the he plays in almost all his movies, the umm, wide speculative gestures, closetalking roundabout, never getting to the...hmmm... sort of a..... And the math professor, not knowing this, is like "Wow, looks like Jeff Goldblum actually spent some time doing character studies for this." Too funny. A+ for getting my pet peeve: THERE IS NO SYLLABUS ON EARTH THAT WOULD HAVE YOU DOING FOURIER SERIES' AND GRAPH THEORY TOGETHER trainwreck of the math in Good Will Hunting (love the movie, but the math is like they picked random sentences out a MIT Press for sciencey stuff.)

I'm pretty sure the equation Homer changes the inequality of is the FRW-derived expansion rate of the universe. There's an H_0 in there, which is Hubble's Constant, and the sign of Omega relates to the combination of factors that impacts universal space-time curvature and/or expansion. If less than 1 you have a closed universe, equal to 1 gives a flat universe and above 1 gives a negative curvature open universe. I might have got some of that wrong, it's been 14 years since I last ran a numerical model involving dark energy and my last 30s brain has replaced it with information I use more regularly, like how to change a tyre or the call outs for Vault of Glass in Destiny.

4:44 Is Jordan saying he doesn't believe that Da Vinci was interested in the Golden Ratio? I can't see anything about that online.

I like this guy, don't get me wrong, but the instant he said "i have a really funny story, actually.." i was like "There's no way this story is funny" and i was totally correct. I think it's something about mathematicians... or maybe university professors... idk, one of these subsets of people doesn't ever use the word "funny" to mean "this might make you laugh", it's always a prefix to a mildly intriguing anecdote. 😂 Still really enjoyed his breakdown, though. Great video!

The extent of my math skills is "Laura Dern is hot."

I'd like to see you break down Scott Steiner's math promo

I was in this film! I made a mistake! 9/10 Lol

In good will hunting I believe the professor had already proved the Theorem he was just using it as to see which of the students could figured it out as well

@2:45 - Fourier transforms and Graph theory *are* very much related (through the eigendecomposition of a normalized Laplacian).

Has anyone caught that he makes a mistake at 4 minutes and says that A would have to equal zero, when actually B would have to equal zero?

I'm surprised he didn't do any scenes from Hidden Figures. Especially the scene where Kevin Costner hands Taraji Henson the chalk and she does the calculations regarding landing the capsule in front of all the bigwigs at the meeting.

Homer's inequality error reminds me of the cartoon I drew some years back. You see a rocket hurtling downward, and one of the people in the capsule says, "But all I missed was the sign!"

Removes greater than sign (>) replaces with less than sign(

The golden ratio, Fibonacci sequence, an interesting thing but not as ubiquitous as some folk make out. Anyway good video, and cool that you were in one of them.

He says he misspoke in his own scene in Gifted by saying "seven" instead of "five", but at 12:38 you can clearly saying "divisible by 5". So he's only wrong about being wrong! Since he is talking about n being of congruent to 4 mod 5, the result being divisible by 5, and partitions being shown on the blackboard, I'm guessing this lecture must be about Ramanujan's famous mod 5 congruence. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramanujan%27s_congruences ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ZSUIN8m7Bfo.html

Numb3rs?! (yes not a film but as far as maths, I feel like they do a better job getting non mathematicians excited about their work; despite the inaccuracies of dialogue and equations)

The professor saying something glaringly wrong and not correcting himself is, in my experience, a 100% accurate depection if a math lecture.. especially if it shows a student sitting there wondering if he is just a moron for thinking there was a mistake and missing all of the important parts of the lecture as he engages in internal debate

Ironically Jordan makes a mistake at 1:31

Never watched baseball, don’t see the appeal, but Moneyball’s a fantastic movie. Would recommend it to anyone.

1:32 He actually ERASES A GREATER THAN sign and REPLACES IT WITH A LESS THAN SIGN you said the opposite

Really interested to hear what he thinks about the movie "In our Prime" (2022)

You forgot the fine structure constant on the black board in "The Simpsons."

A mathematician and an engineer are walking together when they're approached by a gambling hustler. The hustler points to 2 beautiful down the block. "You see those women? They're 100 feet away." The mathematician and engineer agreed that the distance appeared to be about 100 feet. "Here's the deal, fellas. Once every 60 seconds, you can approach them by half the remaining distance. If you can reach them, they'll take care of every fantasy you've ever had". The mathematician just laughs in the hustler's face. Then, he notices the engineer walking toward the women. He calls toward the engineer, "You can't be that stupid! You know it's a parabolic curve - you'll never get there!" The engineer looks back and says, "I know - but in about 6 minutes, I'll be close enough that it won't matter".

3:28 "I just want to speak to the soundtrack" can anyone explain to me what that means?

Is this Alternate Reality Amir Blumenfeld? (But seriously, great vid)

The Eilenberg-Mac Lane, Eilenberg-Steenrod, Eilenberg-Moore person? Oh never mind.

Actually think all the a and b stuff was just a cheat code on nes

When was this recorded? He discusses Moneyball, so, that's 2011 or something. So, he should not have called Fermat's Last Theorem a "conjecture". It's been proved already back in 1993.

Try " FERMATS ROOM " WITH ENGLISH SUBTITLES .

Homer did not replace a less than sign and change it to a greater than sign....he did the opposite! Of course, if you are reading from right to left. Goes to show that even the best make those tiny irritating math symbol mistakes....especially negative signs....

0:51 Fun fact ..... ya sorry Homer. Not even close. The writers should have at least picked numbers that were close to satisfying the equation.

The personal links here are fucking crazy af. 🤯synchronicity or some shit. It's mental! When he said that bit about meeting a guy making a movie about math and it was fucking THE Pi the emoji I used earlier captures what happened at that point in this room.

Too bad you didn't do the Snake Lemma found in It's My Turn

I didn't know Judd Apatow knew so much about Maths

Math rules! I always liked math and I feel I know why people don't like it: because it has bad PR, because people think that if you are good in one area you are not good in another (a complete lie) and because people don't know what is math for! I know the practical applications of mathematics but that's not what I'm talking about - the question most people have is "I won't put any of this stuff to practical use so why should I learn it?" Math teaches us to think. That's why we should learn math. Math is a likeable subject and is fun. I think, however, that particularly nowadays, math should be taught aiming "teaching how to think" and not "training how to do calculations". I have an HP15C calculator in front of me right now - it costs, used, from 200 to 700 dollars. Your cell phone, however, is more powerful than a Cray 3 Supercomputer and I'm sure there's an HP15C calculator app for it. We don't need to know how to do calculations - it would be good, though, that we could learn what's happening when we do calculations. Is it important to know and practice the properties of the exponential function? For a small number of people it is - for most people, it isn't. It's however important to understand why and how things like credit card unpaid debts, a nuclear explosion and the spread of a virus are related to each other precisely because of the exponential function. Well, the three things are also related because they are bad ... but could the understanding of their relationship to the exponential function help me avoid these three bad things? Yes, it can! What can I learn from a proving the square root of two is an irrational number? Well, it won't teach you that the square root of two is an irrational number because you already know that - it will teach you how we can think about problems that present us with two possible outcomes (it can only be rational or irrational) by supposing it's the easier thing to deal with and then reaching an absurd conclusion that proves it's actually the other possibility.) Should healthcare be free (tax funded) and universal? Let's suppose it's not free, what would happen? Well, then private companies would provide healthcare. What would be the main source of income for those private companies? It would be disease and not health - therefore, it would be a diseasecare system and not a healthcare system so, by absurd, I proved healthcare should be free. I must confess I used a trick up there - not a math trick but an advertisement trick: I supposed viewers of this video would lean towards universal halthcare and used it on a PR campaign for Mathematics. Well ... it was the only example I could think of right now. In Engineering we use mathematics often to gauge the behavior of a system - in a quick and superficial manner - by supposing some values are zero or tend to infinity. The electric power a wire carries is the voltage multiplied by the current; the wire, however, heats up with high currents and if the current doubles, the heat quadruples. If I could have a voltage approaching a very large value then the current could have a very low value and the power would be the same! I can't get voltages to approach an infinite value but I know that the higher is can go the less energy I'll loose by heating the wires. A reasoning like that could help us think how to spend public money on healthcare, for instance, because resources are not infinite and we want to save the most lives we can with those limited resources.

You forgot the TV show "Numb3rs", where a mathematician helps his brother, a FBI Agent, to solve crimes using maths. I bet there would be some thing to be said about it.

Yes! Loved that you pointed out the soundtrack, it was sick! I need to find out what it is

in all these series of videos (which I enjoy) what I don’t get is, what is 9 out of 10? what makes simpsons to be 10 out of 10? what did they do wrong?

Can someone link me a documentary about he US military's interest in chaos theory? Like the way he says it they went INTO it massively! I've never heard about this before. It seems sooo fucking esoteric it's fascinated me.

I'll always be cautious about watching aviation and space movies because I might find them annoying, so I feel him on Good Will Hunting. Too much artistic license really kills the story. I try to enjoy the movies and I usually can, but don't think I don't see what they did wrong. I can't help but notice 😛😂

3:50 me oh yeah yeah I see 🤯

What about hidden figures??

3:46, All I can say to this the first time hearing it is "Yes." I would have to have him explain it a little bit for me in order to understand that, lol. 07/08/2022, 3:46AM