Prove it

Movie: Proof. I’m willing to pitch in and hire Gwyneth Paltrow a voice coach so she can learn to stop speaking through her nose. Of course, an acting coach might be needed too. Since she’s won an Academy Award, it could just be me, but I wish she would learn some emotions besides whiney and annoyed. Her character in this film seems bored, and therefore I found her boring. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in school and around mathematicians, but it’s my understanding that they’re passionate about their work to the point of fanatical. That they feel compelled to do math, either in their head or on paper. This film’s character seems totally ambivalent about the talent she possesses and is only spurred to action by her father pushing her. In fact, the math books lining her bookshelves she says are only for show. She really reads Cosmo. Perhaps that was her attempt at a joke. I was also unimpressed with the lack of mathematics in the movie. The one interesting thing mentioned is that there have been so few women mathematicians throughout history. It isn’t because women are incapable of such thought, so what happens to all the math-minded females of the world? I suspect they end up working in a library.