Death Proof

[pozorvlak]

My flatmates and I went to see the new Quentin Tarantino film, Death Proof, last night. In this off-beat thriller, Tarantino turns his trademark blend of hip dialogue and beautifully-shot ultraviolence to the world of pure mathematics. Kurt Russell stars as an embittered former number theorist who plots revenge on the profession that wronged him by

Comments

[pozorvlak]

It would also, I think, make her the first female Fields Medallist (but not the first New Zealander).

[half_of_monty]

Oh yes. What rubbishness.

Why doesn't Claire Voisin have one?

[pozorvlak]

Institutional sexism?

FWIW, I've never heard of her, but then I don't work in algebraic geometry.

[footnotetoplato]

I wouldn't have thought that that would obviously lead to a finite Erdös-Bacon number for anyone except herself ... unless some of her academic colleagues had also appeared in films with her, or co-stars also co-authored papers.

[pozorvlak]

Yeah, the definition of Erdős-Bacon number is clearly the Wrong Thing. The Right Thing, as any fule can see, is the sum of the lengths of the minimal paths to Bacon and to Erdős on the graph whose vertices are people and whose edges are films and mathematical papers. In other words, the graph which is the colimit of the following diagram:

{People} --> {People and co-appearances in films}
|
|
v
{People and coauthorship of mathematical papers}

[footnotetoplato]

I'm not so sure. Your definition agrees with my intuition for the system, but there's something quite compelling about having to travel in two independent systems as per the conventional approach; it certainly makes finite E-B numbers a lot more exclusive.