| Contributed by
Fusun Akman (Coastal Carolina University)
About a mathematician who writes a proof of the Snake Lemma at the
speed of
light. Her love interest was Michael Douglas, some sort of athlete.
One mathematician I know claims he wrote a paper just so that he
could cite this movie for the proof of the Snake Lemma."
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| Contributed by
Stephen Gagola (Kent State)
-
"Jill has an exchange with a precocious boy, probably junior high school age, about prime numbers. This was a big disappointment
for me: mathematically precocious kids this age are a lot smarter than was represented in the exchange.
- At one point, some University administrator, probably a Dean, mentions to Jill Clayburgh that 'Group theory is a really hard area to
work in'. I wish our own administrators would believe that.
-
Jill's father, at one point, introduces his daughter as a mathematician who is working in finite simple groups. How many group
theorists have parents who know what they do? Also, I heard as an anecdote, that this scene had to be edited. The father had first
introduced his daughter as someone working in the area of finite, simple, ABELIAN groups. A mathematician (or someone
knowledgeable about the subject) present during the screening broke out in laughter on hearing this.
- Jill, at one point working on the back of an envelope, is frustrated that she `can't quite get this 2-fusion problem to work out'.
- The movie ends on an up-beat note, mathematically, when the obnoxious grad student and Jill share (in a rather cryptic exchange)
some clever insight that would lead to the solution of the classification problem. Interestingly enough, 1980 (the year of the movie) is
the more-or-less agreed date that the finite simple groups were classified."
|
| Contributed by
Norman Levitt
"Given that Clayburgh was going to prove
the "snake lemma", why the hell didn't
she generalize slightly and derive the
long homology exact sequence associated
to a short exact sequence of chain
complexes? Only in Hollywood ....
By the way, as it happens, when I saw
this film some 21 years ago, I had,
just the day before, lectured on the
homology exact sequence in an intro
algebraic topology course. Thus, I
couldn't resist blurting out
Clayburgh's lines (and those of the
grad students) before they were
delivered. I got some odd looks from
the audience, believe you me."
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