It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

Popular culture has a problem with genius. It treats it as abnormal (and it is) and that it taps into information that man was not meant to know (jury is up for debate). Thus, in the quest for knowledge, we are doomed to madness.

This is clearly what happens in Darren Aronofsky's precocious debut, Pi, where the knowledge of some number, involved with some mysticism on the nature of God, ultimately leads the lead character to madness, and only when he forsakes such knowledge does he finally come to know happiness.

Even though Star Trek inspired a generation's worth of American scientists and engineers, it was guilty of portraying genius as isolating and maddening. In the original series episode, The Ultimate Computer, Richard Daystrom is portrayed as a genius at developing intelligent computers. His accomplishments made him the boy wonder, and yet he spent the rest of his life trying to recapture that glory, and in the process went to madness.

The Next Generation was just as guilty. In a Season 7 episode, Serova is the genius who discovers that warp drive is creating tears in the universe. To be fair, her brother is a collaborator, but the episode makes clear that she has done the majority of the work.

In the second season episode Schizoid Man, Ira Graves, who was said to have taught Noonian Soong, Data's creator, transfers his intelligence into Data, to avoid his mind dying as his body does.

Genius is often protrayed as isolating and potentially maddening. Geniuses often lack social skills, being irritable and irrational, although occasionally, there is the protrayal of the absent-minded professor.

In Good Will Hunting, Matt Damon plays Will Hunting, a Southie (a section of Boston not noted for its mathematicians) who is a math genius, despite no one recognizing him as such (until very late), and doing little on-screen math. He gets to work at a construction site, and do janitorial work while at MIT.

Part of the film's debate is embodied by Robin Williams whose character, Sean Maguire, did not pursue his genius fully, while Stellan Skarsgård's Gerald Lambeau did, and they represent the two sides of Will Hunting, who is trying to decide whether he should pursue his math genius or pursue a girl (or both or neither). Will Hunting argues to Maguire, who serves as his psychiatrist, that being a construction worker is just as noble as being a mathematician, and there is nothing wrong with it. Maguire agrees, but points out that it is Hunting who has managed to get jobs that get him to MIT to work on problems.

He should have pointed out another form of precociousness that people rarely question. The film, being set in Boston, talks about a historic Red Sox game from the 70s (in principle, before Hunting was born). They both talked excitedly about this game. Williams' character should have asked Hunting if he had superior baseball talent, would he give that up to be a construction worker. Where the answer (to a sports fan) would be an unqualified yes, the answer is more ambiguous for a math career.

Indeed, athletic prowess does not have a similar madness, and that's because we see athletic prowess all the time. Is Barry Bonds going mad? He might be juiced, but no one suggests that trying to be the best athlete you can be is wrong (even if, in reality, due to the amount of money involved and the machismo of sports, many athletes live with pain all their lives, that the rest of us never have to deal with).

Proof is the film adaptation of a play where a mathematician, played by Anthony Hopkins, has gone crazy. Possibly modelled after John Nash who became a schizophrenic, Robert (Hopkins) has long since been unable to do real math. Alas, the film still needs him to be a professor and have students, so that Catherine, who is Robert's daughter, can have a love interest.

Perhaps due to its play heritage, there are very few characters in the film. It boils down to Hopkins, playing the father, Paltrow, the daughter who has taken care of him since his descent into madness, Hope Davis, looking every bit like Hillary Clinton, playing the other sister who left Chicago for New York, for her career, while not caring for her dad, and Gyllenhaal, the love interest.

While everyone does a superb job of acting, Gyllenhaal's character is fairly thin, and Hope Davis's only a bit better. This is really Paltrow's movie as she wrestles with whether she will become like her dad. The mystery set into place, whether she, or her father, wrote a critical proof, is somewhat artificial, but since it was a play, it's somewhat thought out, as a daughter who loves her father, wants to do him proud, and yet, also wants to believe that he can still be successful. She has mixed feelings about taking care of her father, and in fact, so much time is spent there that it's not spent on whether she can do math or not.

In other words, while Proof makes a good drama, and even begins to capture some of the elements of college life, it doesn't say a great deal about mathematics, nor the pursuit of math. To its credit, it almost doesn't make note of the fact that a woman could be great in math, except in one brief line about Sophie Germain. Gyllenhaal never says "if this proof is really yours, you will be the best known female mathematician ever".

The story is rather non-linear, floating back and forth between when Robert is alive and when he's dead.

While I can admire the acting, and even the lack of obvious stereotyping (except the madness bit) for all but perhaps Hope Davis's character, I wish the math was played up more, or at least, the mathematical mindset. Critics probably don't notice since many are not mathematicians. However, many are writers. Roger Ebert criticized the film Finding Forrester for Sean Connery's blah advice about writing, though presumably the advice was better in Wonder Boys.

As with many such stories, the outside world is generally shut out. This, we really have four characters, rather than many other minor characters that would probably serve a more important role in the lives of these characters. And of course, we're supposed to believe that impossibly gorgeous Paltrow and Gyllenhaal are nerds. Hollywood's not quite prepared to have people who are, by Hollywood standards, ugly, especially women, to play these roles. Even so, they do the best they can given the actors they have to make them somewhat less than glamorous, though, c'mon, Gyllenhaal's day old beard is still way too trim for real grad students.