Mathematicians Become Hollywood Consultants

techstar25 writes "With the recent success of movies incorporating mathematics, Dr. Jonathan Farley, a professor of mathematics at the State University of New York at Buffalo who is currently doing research at Harvard, tapped into his professional knowledge and headed west to Hollywood, where he and Dr. Elizabeth Burns, founded Hollywood Math and Science Consulting to help television and movie producers portray accurate mathematics on screen. Their first client: the CBS drama Numb3rs. 'In many cases, they want me to elaborate on some of the math already in the script,' said Farley. 'I help add dialogue and fine tune the math already in the script. It's not just about fixing mathematical mistakes . . . It's also about helping them get the culture right.'"

numb3rs huh?

[ShaniaTwain]

Their first client: the CBS drama Numb3rs.

maybe they should get a spelling consultant too?

This needs to be done more!

[jakel2k]

Too bad there are no Jedi around.

Re:Math Culture?

[geomon]

What exactly is Math culture?

The stuff found growing inside of a calculus textbook?

Finally

[lateralus_1024]

We're getting closer to the day when we won't have the lame keyboard beeps when a hollywood hacker types on his Dell(tm) latitude.

Re:numb3rs huh?

[cephyn]

yeah. there's WAY more symbols and numbers in 1337sp34|

Re:They do need help

[suitepotato]

On typical example is using statistics to predict exactly when and where a specific event will occur.

Such as where and when the sun will rise, where Orion will appear in the sky, and when Jupiter will be in Aquarius?

Oh, you meant really useful events. I wish they'd predict when I'm going to get to see a really entertaining episode where I don't feel a need to strangle Kirsch.

Hmm...

[physicsphairy]

So instead of having dashingly handsome and witty mathematicians who know kung fu and have packs of women trailing at their feet... now we're going to have eccentric old guys with frizzy hair talking for half an hour about homogeneous manifolds not realizing until an hour later that they came in on the wrong day and that's why none of their students are there?

Heh, I look forward to having the movie theaters all to myself when these new movies come out. :)

Spammers, 911

[grasshoppa]

Follow our sorta brave team as they eat pizza, read slashdot, and, eventually, figure out who sent them the Penis Enlargement ads.

Tonight! On Spammers, 911: The team finds a traitor in the midst, he purchased Viagra from South Africa. Will he be sorry! Stay tuned.

Re:Math Culture?

[zonx lebaam]

OK, here's some "Math Culture"

Mathematicians are just machines for transforming coffee into theorems ...

It's the Cult of the Red Heifer

[weston]

This [canncentral.org] is math culture.

"We were all in advanced analysis or something. We'd been working on a proof in class for a week, and we'd reached an impasse, an impossible stage, and in the dream logic, the only way we were going to be able to progress was if (and only if) someone cut off their arm: the requirement was 'proof by mutilation.' And the scary thing was, we were going to do it, there was no question or discussion about that, the only thing we hadn't settled yet was whose arm we were going to use."

Re:Math Culture?

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly is Math culture?

Imagine a place where there is no girls and only hot-pockets to eat...

oh..wait.. that's slashdot!

Re:Now if someone

[lastchance_000]

I wouldn't call that an error. In most offices I've been in, that's exactly what most non-IT workers would do when given those instructions.

imagine this scene:

[roman_mir]

A former government agent is running a terrorist organization set to destroy america's way of life. A sleek matematicion who was just released from prison for an algorithm DMCA violation is brought into the terrorist organization under a false pretence and he is offered a rather large amount of money to do what he does best: hack some mathematics.

The terrorist chief (Travolta) uses his right hand woman (no pun intended here) - (Halle Barry) to coerce the matimatician (Hugh Jackman) into this entire deal.

The matimatician is given a task to complete: he has to prove Poincaré conjecture - a rather simple task for such a super intelligent person but he only has 60 seconds to do it (including the side axioms and whatnot) while one of the terrorists is holding a gun to his head and a beatiful girl is sucking on his dong.

Now a serious question: how is Travolta's character supposed to know whether the theorem was proven correctly? I say they should still have instructed the girl to byte the guys dick off. Just for good measure, to show this brain-guy they are not kidding around!

Almost...

[temojen]

calculus Audio pronunciation of "calculus" ( P ) Pronunciation Key (klky-ls) n. pl. calculi (-l) or calculuses

1. Pathology. An abnormal concretion in the body, usually formed of mineral salts and found in the gallbladder, kidney, or urinary bladder, for example.

from here [reference.com]

Re:Math Culture?

[Frogbert]

Average Joe: How does that work.
Mathman: You wouldn't understand meer mortal. I grow weary of this conversation... away with you peasant!
Average Joe leaves in disgust to talk to women.
Mathman: ... I'm so lonely.

Re:Tech in Twenty-Four

[cbuskirk]

Are you kidding! I'm I much better tech thanks to 24. Now I can fix any problem by opening up a socket.

Re:Now if someone

[suitepotato]

Oh dear yes. Why do we see a never-ending procession of programs with displays that look like Windows, but aren't actually Windows? Licensing and so on likely, but come on. Microsoft would likely kill for someone to actually show a real recognizable Windows desktop on the screen running a real recognizable app of theirs.

Laughable more is that most seem like boxes drawn in basic VGA graphics in DOS using QBasic. If I see a *nix prompt, it is almost inevitably a phosphor terminal to an unidentified, but quite often Xenix, machine. I call for shooting the budgeting people who insist on keeping these dinosaurs alive in the corner under eight inches of dust as an aside.

"I can trace his traffic across the network. It's ATM from him to-" WHOA! He can see layer 2 traffic without having access to the ISP/NSP routers between the client and the far end? Let me know how this trick works because I need five different usernames and passwords to do it as part of my ISP job and it takes thirty minutes to gather it all from every router and then another thirty to make coherent sense of it in a proper bulletproof result sense.

"His password will be hard to crack but I think I can do it." (five seconds pass) "Yeah, I got in." Was it password by any chance? L0phtcrack takes longer with a two digit password.

"He's got all sorts of pictures on his hard drive showing the area of the crime." This from a workstation at the PD, supposedly secretly "hacked" in to the suspect's PC. Let me guess, Linksys router set up as promiscuously as possible? File and print sharing full on? Well known trojans running?

If you did a mathematical/statistical attack on the problem of what they are actually typing during shooting based on relative position of fingers visibile in the shot and the keyboard size, you'd probably get, "i have no idea what i am doing"

Re:Almost...

[geomon]

Thanks, smartass, for ruining a perfectly good joke with "facts". ;)

I had no idea that calculus was so ickey.

Re:About Numb3rs

[cmdr_beeftaco]

"It's good to know that they are going the extra mile to get some real world application into the shows"

I am sorry but since when did professors of Math become "real world." Those guys are out there man, didn't you see A Beautiful Mind?

Hollywood cares about accuracy?

[homer_ca]

The guys directing the car chases must not have gotten the memo. How do you explain this?

- Cars that explode in midair when they go over a cliff before hitting anything
- Ducati 916 motorcycles that can't outrun a Lincoln Town Car (Fled)
- Tom Cruise shooting behind him over his shoulder using a motorcycle rearview mirror to aim
- Tires squealing on dirt roads
- Soundtrack to John Connor's dirt bike upshifts 20 times without downshifting

Swordfish

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean nobody ever holds a gun to your head while somebody goes down on you to make sure you finish a project on deadline?

That's company policy around here and the only problem is that you take turns being the programmer.

I'll bet [objoke]

[lildogie]

Two math consultants are sitting in the studio cafeteria, and one says to the other: "I'll bet you $50 that waitress is an unemployed mathematician."

His friend the bet. Then while his friend is in the washroom, he calls the waitress over and says "There's a $20 tip for you if, after my friend comes back, you come over and answer my next question "four thirds pi r cubed."

So his friend comes back from the washroom, and the waitress comes over and he says to her, "What's the integral of pi r squared?"

"Four thirds pi r cubed," she says, "plus a constant."

Re:Tech in Twenty-Four

[Martin Blank]

I've been watching Kojak for some mindless enjoyment, but I cringed physically when someone started talking about IP addresses. They were tracking a suspect's IP address (244.x.x.x) from the old home, to a series of internet cafes -- the suspect was taking the address with him wherever he went.

I ended up giving them a point for not assigning an octet above 255. :-\

Re:Mathematics Out of the Closet

[Anonymous Coward]

we all know it really takes FOUR clicks

Re:Math Culture?

[hikerhat]

What exactly is Math culture?

It's the culture the people in the computer science culture failed to become members of.

Great

[Locke2005]

Next thing you know, movies stars will be trading witty barbs like "when you take the closed integral of your personality from negative to postive infinity, you get zero!"

Re:Now if someone

[MutantHamster]

Now that's silly! That reminds me of a Garfield I saw where he ate an entire cake! No cat could eat that much! He'd get sick! Oh, I wish they'd hire some consultants for that horrible Jim Davis.

Re:Hmmm 24 comes to mind...

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to fix your spelling first.

Finally!

[flajann]

Finally us matheticians will be taken seriously!

Everything I know I learned from watching 24

[M.C. Hampster]

Why is it that they can send Jack anything on his PDA whever he is, but they are constantly copying files to CD's to move data from one computer to another only a few feet away?

People complain about tech in CSI, but 24 takes the cake.

Re:I'll bet [objoke]

[donutello]

An unemployed mathematician meets an employed mathematician.

Q: What does the employed mathematician say to the unemployed mathematician?

A: Do you want fries with that?

Re:Hollywood cares about accuracy?

[Surt]

These are easy to explain.

- Cars that explode in midair when they go over a cliff before hitting anything

Easy: bombs in the gas tank. You should always check for angle activated bombs in your gas tank before driving over a cliff.

- Ducati 916 motorcycles that can't outrun a Lincoln Town Car (Fled)

You've gotta remember to use premium.

- Tom Cruise shooting behind him over his shoulder using a motorcycle rearview mirror to aim

Even I've done this on one occassion. A star with proper training should have no difficulty.

- Tires squealing on dirt roads

It's the people just under the dirt squealing, and believe me you would too.

- Soundtrack to John Connor's dirt bike upshifts 20 times without downshifting

That was a custom bike. He clearly did work on it in one scene earlier. He added a lot of gears.

I kept telling people Math is useful

[birdowner]

See, there are even jobs out there!

Re:Tech in Twenty-Four

[angrist]

Send that to my screen, and getting working on a new protcol for division!

Re:The official math joke thread

[Darby]

A Topologist is a person who can't tell the difference between his ass and a hole in the ground, but can tell the difference between his ass and two holes in the ground.

Re:The Hammy Awards

[Anonymous Coward]

But not just a meteor! In order to reroute it they'll fire nuclear missiles into it until the trajectory lines up with LA (somehow) so it's a radioactive meteor that will release particles into the atmosphere shortly before crashing into LA that will turn us all into mutuants, except for the terrorists who are already mutuants and have nothing to lose!

Dear god, have I said too much?

Sincerely, A 24 script writer.

kidding :D

Re:Math Culture?

[bjgeraci]

Okay, a mathematician brought his friend to a math convention and in one room there was a large group of people. Someone stood up and said "230" and everyone laughed for a while. Someone else said "567" and everyone really laughed.

His friend asked "What's going on?"

The mathematician said that the group had remembered the top 1000 jokes in the world, and rather than spend the time telling it, they would just call out the number to be more efficient.

The friend said "Can I try?"

The mathematician said "Sure."

The friend then called out "432."

The crowd was silent and muttering.

The friend tried "567."

More muttering.

Finally the friend asked "What's wrong?"

The mathematician said, "Well, some people just can't tell a joke...."

...the next day, the mathematician took a different friend to the convention and again they met the crowd telling jokes. This friend got permission to tell a joke and then addressed the crowd.

"-1" is what the friend said.

There was at first stunned silence. Then a murmur. Then the noise grew louder until the room exploded in side-splitting laughter.

...for you see, they never heard that one before....

Re:They do need help

[Anonymous Coward]

pretty easy when your projections include every bank in the city, yeah?

Re:Now if someone

[king-manic]

"Now that's silly! That reminds me of a Garfield I saw where he ate an entire cake! No cat could eat that much! He'd get sick! Oh, I wish they'd hire some consultants for that horrible Jim Davis."

Sarcasm aside, jim davis has made a astonishingly long career out of a single premise that has essentially 4 jokes. Repeated at naseum.

Re:Mathematics Out of the Closet

[ocie]

A similar trick was used in Blade Runner, but the rest of the movie more than makes up for it. Now where's that picture I took of the Women's locker room door...

Re:Mathematics Out of the Closet

[Pendersempai]

COMPUTAR! ENHANCE!

Re:Killjoys

[phek]

So that means if I shoot a newborn baby with a .45, the baby will move 3 feet in 1 second in a frictionless vacuum...? good to know.

Re:I'll bet [objoke]

[zoloto]

Speaking of jokes, here's a good one.

Did you hear about the constipated mathematician?

He worked it out with a pencil! /bad //so bad

Re:I'll bet [objoke]

[Repton]

Hey, I can play this game.

A man walking along the road at night sees a mathematician standing under a street lamp, staring at the ground. The mathematician explains that he's looking for his keys. The man asks where he dropped them. The mathematician points at his house, three doors down. "But the light is better over here!"

...

What's purple and commutes? --- an Abelian grape.

What's purple, commutes, and is worshipped by a limited number of people? --- a finitely-venerated Abelian grape.

What's yellow and equivalent to the axiom of choice? --- Zorn's lemon.

...

Back in the days of the iron curtain, a group of Polish mathematicians and scientists decide to steal a plane and escape to the west. They manage to get into an empty plane, but there's a problem: none of them know how to fly. The mathematician volunteers to have a go at figuring out the instruments. While he sits there, looking, the others are getting worried. They can hear approaching sirens. They beg the mathematician to hurry up, to think faster. He replies: "Have patience --- I'm just a simple Pole in a complex plane."

...

What's the contour integral around Western Europe? --- 0, because all the Poles are in Eastern Europe. (actually, there are Poles in Western Europe, but they're removable)

...

(all from memory)

Re:Mathematics Out of the Closet

[Dabido]

"The brain is damn good at that too btw."
I already do that sort of thing by squinting at the pixilated people who are supposedly anonymous on TV and see who they really are. :-)

Re:Math Culture?

[EventHorizon]

Mathgirl: Hey Mathman! Can you teach me how to integrate around a pole?

Yeah, well.. a theorist can dream.

Main Event

[Anonymous Coward]

Watch these two 5-digit slashdot UID's go at it, in an all out slugfest of trolls and flamebait. Brought to you by Budweiser and the letter 'A'.

Re:I'll bet [objoke]

[ProfitElijah]

Yeah I heard it turned out to be a natural log.

Re:I'll bet [objoke]

[Vo0k]

A famous maths professor working at a university, one day calls a plumber because his tap is leaking. The plumber replaces the seal, presents the bill.

"Whoa! That's a week of my salary! For replacing a simple seal!"
"Want to earn as much as I do? Become a plumber. It really IS that easy."

So the professor decided to give it a try. And it really worked out great. He left the university, he was repairing pipes, replacing seals, several works a week, salary about 20 times what he would get from the university. It lasted several years.

Until the Union decided all plumbers need to have at least high school finished. So, there were some classes to refresh the memory and then a test. And the math class, teacher calls our professor to the blackboard and asks to write the formula for surface of a circle.

And the professor realises it was so long ago since he used it last, sometime during studies yet, that he forgot! But he thinks, "I'm a math professor. I can derive that formula". So he starts deriving it. Draws a circle, splits into infinite number of infinitisemal pieces, adds Jacobian for radial projection, integrates and satisfied, writes: S=-pi*r^2.

But hey, that minus must be wrong, surface can't be negative. So he starts checking his calculations, looks at them, examines, can't find the mistake. Time passes, the teacher looks, more and more annoyed, whispers rise from the classroom, and after a while they become recognisable: "Reverse the limits of the integral! Reverse the limits of the integral!"

Re:Mathematics Out of the Closet

[Ced_Ex]

You mean Adobe's Photoshop CSI?