Hacker Cinema
Fermat's Last Theorem
1996 · Film · documentary · 50 min
Directed by Simon Singh
Andrew Wiles stumbled across the world's greatest mathematical puzzle, Fermat's Theorem, as a ten-year-old schoolboy, beginning a 30-year quest with just one goal in mind: to solve the problem that has baffled minds for three centuries.
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10 comments on Hacker News
He mentions in the Horizon "Fermat's Last Theorem" documentary that Taniyama was "not a careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes, but he made mistakes in a good direction, so eventually he got [to] the right answer, and I tried to imitate him, but I found out that it is very difficult to make good mistakes." He says it with a wry grin.
The excellent Horizon documentary, "Fermat's Last Theorem", about Wiles' proof has some great interview footage with Shimura where he even discusses his sadness and being perplexed at Taniyama's sudden suicide.
When asked about Wiles' proof proving their conjecture, he quips with a sly grin: "Well, my first reaction was, 'I told you so.'"
A beautiful and touching documentary about Fermat's last theorem, Wiles, and the other mathematicians involved in its proof: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x223gx8
"Learning math" to understand "cryptography" seems to me as a narrow goal. I have an impression that observing it that way you can get disinterested as soon as "the math" is doing its "mathy" things of developing itself just for the sake of it. Because that's math in essence. You want to be on the level of "applied" math but you have to be ready to "dirty" your hands with math "just so" too. Once you are proficient enough to feel comfortable of approaching math as something that doesn't have one purpose and not even some universal consistency (e.g. not in all cases is the notation the same) it will be easier for you: then you use math as a tool, but you aren't afraid of that tool. But a lot of math exists for itself.
My suggestion, it worked for me: buy a lot of paper, like, thousands of sheets. Take some books with the problems (and also with the solutions) then work through, maybe more than once. Don't say you haven't tried until you actually used all these sheets to write your own derivations of the solutions. If you once see the solution, you have to try the second time without looking. I could not learn by not really doing it, a lot, and I don't think anybody can. You can't just "read" it as you read history books, you have to "work" it.
A lot of people simply can't imagine themselves sitting and filling the papers with formulas (also in the comments here), but don't have problems spending months doing video games, for example. It's this "belief" that's limiting.
On another side, you need to have some kind of context too, but you have to find the interactions of the context and the actual work you do yourself. I like the "historical" context, because the big steps in math were traditionally not accidental. Archimedes invented the kind of "infinite" methods to calculate volume of some solids, and the methods remained forgotten, people remembering just results, Newton also invented a new math just to solve the problems he considered etc. For you, you have to adjust your steps to the knowledge you already have: if you know little, you can't avoid spending time learning the basic stuff. You have to work through, step by step.
Maybe also watch the documentary about Fermat's Last Theorem as an example of how it looks like doing math.
Its well worth watching one of the best documentaries ever made:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x223gx8_bbc-horizon-1996-fermat-s-last-theorem_shortfilms
He explains the experience of a genuine Eureka moment after herculean effort and false dawns and its incredibly moving. I also enjoy when the other mathematicians are asked to explain modular forms... and struggle a little :)
There's a really nice documentary on Andrew Wiles and Fermat's Last Theorem
https://vimeo.com/18216532
It even gives a high level description of the methods used for those who are interested.
That list was incomplete. I added a recent Indian film about Ramanujan and a Soviet film about Sofia Kovalevskaya from the 1980s. FWIW, there's also an upcoming film "Dau" (in post-production) about the Russian mathematical physicist Lev Landau.
One difficulty is that the Wikipedia list does not include made for TV movies and documentaries, like 'Dangerous Knowledge' (2007) on Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, or the BBC documentary 'Isaac Newton: The Last Magician' (2013), or the PBS documentary 'Newton's Dark Secrets' (2005), or "Breaking the Code" (1996), another biography of Turing, or "Freedom Man" (1989) about the black American mathematician Benjamin Banneker, or the 1973 Italian TV movie "Non ho tempo" about Galois, or Simon Singh's 1996 documentary "Fermat's Last Theorem", focusing on Andrew Wiles but including other mathematicians.
Or the BBC documentary "The Birth Of Calculus" (1986) on Leibniz, the four-part BBC series "The Story of Maths" (2008), the 2008 "Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem", or ... I think you get the picture that there are many TV movies about mathematicians, and most of them are white males. BTW, none of them are "average".
When "Moneyball" was turned into a movie, people asked how a book that dealt with statistics could be turned into a movie, since statistics alone isn't that interesting. What big screen movie is there to make out of Dirichlet's life? Of Riemann's? Of Wiles'?
So, of "regular white guy scientists or mathematicians we've mythologized in the past 20 years", where I'll define "mythologized" to mean "made a movie about them", and I'll limit it to feature length films based on lives of actual scientists:
"Kinsey" (2004) on Kinsey, "Copenhagen" (2002, TV) on a meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg, "Creation" (2009) on Darwin, "Something the Lord Made" (2004) about heart surgeons (one of which was a white male), "Tim's Vermeer" (2013) though that's more an amateur scientist, "The Aviator" (2004) about Howard Hughes (aerospace engineer and inventor), "A Dangerous Method" (2011) concerning Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (the first two being white males), this fall the film "Experimenter" about Stanley Milgram will be released, "The Insider" (1999) is a drama based on the research scientist Jeffrey Wigand, and "The Strangest Dream" (2008) about the physicist Joseph Rotblat.
Those are movies about 10+ real scientists, all male, straight, and not disabled, plus a couple of others. (There were a few movies with other than white, male, straight characters, but certainly not this many.)
You for some reason switched to fictional scientists with Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014). Why is that? For that matter, you restricted me to scientists and mathematicians, while the protagonists of Gravity are engineers and astronauts - it's poor form to change your metric part-way through.
If I expand the list to include engineers, astronauts, and similar occupations, then "Captain Phillips" (2013) concerns the captain of the MV Maersk Alabama, which was hijacked by pirates, "The Wind Rises" (2013) about Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II ... oops ! Sory, not a white man, though he would have been an "honorary white" in apartheid South Africa, " Zvorykin-Muromets" (2010) about the Russian inventor of television, "Flash of Genius" (2008) about the Robert Kearns and his invention of the intermittent windshield wiper,
A problem with your list is it's easily interpreted as cherry picking. Jodie Foster was the protagonist of "Contact" (1997), a big budget sci-fi film. How does your choice now of "Gravity" indicate a changed pattern from nearly 20 years ago?
Another problem is that you haven't established what the baseline should be. Given the 12.2% of the US population is "Non-Hispanic Black or African American", what percentage of films with 'hero scientists' should have a "Non-Hispanic Black or African American" in that role? Given that 51% of the adult population in the US are women, how many hero scientist movies should have a women in that role? Perhaps it's more that these roles were previously underrepresented?
Is the pattern you see simply explained by the secular trend that people other than straight white males are becoming more frequent in science?
You ended by picking two items from a different context - postings to HN in the last month and 'male scientists who have been publicly disgraced in the past year', I think to establish a pattern. But you again lack the evidence needed to tell if your observations are really a pattern instead of cherry picking. What is the expected baseline?
If the ratio of men to women in science is 4:1, then we would expect a female scientist to be publicly disgraced with about the same ratio. (It's hard to give a good ratio since I think it's more likely that a senior researcher will be found out and reported in the international news. I believe there are more males in higher level positions than females. Also, "Japanese women account for only 10% of the researchers in Japan" and "only 12 percent of the science and engineering workforce in India was female in 2010", so the international ratio is probably more like 8:1.
Checking now, I searched "Retraction Watch" for all people described by the writers as being "disgraced". The complete list of male scientists in the last few years are: Naoki Mori, James H. Hunton, Dipak Das, Don Poldermans, Yoshitaka Fujii, Joachim Boldt, Diederik Stapel, and Woo-Suk Hwang.
The only disgraced female scientist mentioned is Bengu Sezen.
This 8:1 ratio is about what I expect from the percentage of women doing science in the world stage, and within the error bars for something with so few numbers.
What method did you use to count disgraced male and female scientists? I see you missed Haruko Obokata as another disgraced female scientist, so it doesn't seem like you've done a systematic search.
(A double-check search against sciencemag.org finds Jens Förster and Marc Hauser as additional 'disgraced' male researchers and no additional female researchers. Note that Science does not use the term 'disgraced' in articles about Haruko Obokata.)
Also, what do you use as the ratio for males in science vs. females in science? If it's 4:1 or higher then with 3 male disgraces you would expect less than a 50% chance of hearing about a female in the same situation, no?
Otherwise, if you're just making connections based on the latest hot gossip, then you'll be suffering from some serious bias error. You're not going to hear about Naoki Mori on HN.
Regarding postings to HN, what is your criteria? For example, "Alain Badiou Is Making a Movie About Plato with Brad Pitt and Sean Connery" from 7 days ago is a movie about a guy. Is it mythologizing a male? What about "Deep Web (2015 Documentary) – The Story of the Silk Road" from a month ago - does it mythologize Ross William Ulbricht? How do you define 'mythologizing' in such a way that it's at least roughly repeatable?
If you can't do that, then you don't really have a good metric.
Loved this post.
FYI, the Andrew Wiles quote is from the opening of an awesome BBC documentary about how he solved Fermat's Last Theorem - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FnXgprKgSE
Simon Singh is the same guy as wrote and produced the documentary on "Fermat's Last Theorem":
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=380332
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498494
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1646727
He's also a nice guy, and says nice things about my presentations.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=598385
In addition to the book on cryptography, Singh also directed the film about Fermat's Last Theorem ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermats_last_theorem
... first transmitted by the BBC as part of the Horizon series, subsequently aired in the USA as part of the NOVA series. He also wrote the book that followed. Both have been mentioned here before, both are most highly recommended. The Wikipedia article references Singh's book copiously.
The Code Book, mentioned elsewhere, was his second book.
You can read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Singh
I know Simon quite well, and am following the libel case with interest. (The wikipedia article also references John Stillwell, whom I also know. This is slightly worrying ...)