Catherine's father was a famous mathematician before he went mad in his later years. For 5 years, Catherine has been caring for him at home, even letting her emotions become unstable with her mad dad. Because she didn't send her father to a lunatic asylum, she gave up the opportunity to go to college, and her sister Claire worked hard in New York to pay off the family's mortgage. Even after her father's death, looking at her exhausted and lifeless sister, the good-natured Claire couldn't help but ask, "Why didn't you send him to a lunatic asylum? How do you do me, hello everyone!" I
still remember the first episode of Grey's Anatomy. In one episode, Meredith tried everything she could to convince the mother of a famous doctor who lived in a nursing home with Alzheimer's disease - "she traveled abroad". For those talented, once all-powerful leaders, what is more cruel than Jiang Langcai is the madness. The mediocrity will only be forgotten, but the lunatic will be despised and ridiculed. What's more, Catherine's father, even insane, was reluctant to admit that he lost the ability to do research. Seeing him rummaging through the mountain of books just to find the alien information from the barcode, he doodled and thought he was writing the most elegant proof in the world. As a daughter, he could bear to break his last dignity and shut down the once great mathematician. In a lunatic asylum?
Catherine, while not her father's only daughter, is the only daughter who understands the world of a father. She inherited her father's mathematical talent, and even inherited her sensitive, fragile and neurotic personality. She can write innovative and original proofs, or she can do it three times without the teacher's request. Perhaps, without some crazy adventures, without some courage to take a slant, it is difficult to achieve a great cause on the academic soil. When his father was sober, he once said, "I'm happy with Claire being a currency analyst. But Catherine, I'm so proud of you."
However, it is this high level of fit with her father that makes Catherine fall into her deepest self-doubt - will one day, like my father, go to destruction in madness? Although it is not described in the movie, it is not difficult to imagine that she spent the past 5 years in her sister's questioning of her mental state. Originally, Hal's love soothed her restless heart, but a peerless mathematical proof with unrecognizable handwriting dragged her into a deeper and more persistent self-doubt. Catherine insisted that the proof was written by her, but was suspected by her boyfriend and sister because of the striking similarity between the handwriting and her father. Is this her own imagination.
The death of his father, the unstable history of mental illness, the notebook hidden in the drawer of his father's desk, the proofs that are very similar to his father's handwriting... All kinds of evidence point Catherine to mental illness. So, even she herself was shaken, crying and shouting, ripping mathematics books from the shelf, sitting in a messy room and hysterically saying: "I was wrong, this proves that I didn't write it, I didn't write it... "
In the world of mathematics, there are only two kinds of results of proofs: the hypothesis is true and the hypothesis is not true. No matter how complicated the maze of mathematics is, life is always the sum of the Nth power of its complexity. Is Catherine mentally ill? This in itself is an unprovable subject. Because even if the medical report thinks that her emotional behavior is not pathological, if people around her always look at her as a lunatic, the label of lunatic will not be torn off.
Fortunately, the world still has a time to be reasonable. Hal took the notes back to the university and found two generations of mathematical elites to verify that it was not leaking, and he also used a lot of mathematical methods in the 1980s and 1990s. At that time, Catherine's father's mental state was not enough to complete such a complicated academic research. "You have no problem at all," Hal said.
"These are just evidences, you still have no way of proving that this notebook was written by me," Catherine said.
"But I can make an opposite hypothesis and prove that there's no way you didn't write this note," Hal said.
However, the law of proof by contradiction does not always apply. There are so many possibilities in life that we cannot rule out all the possibilities one by one to find out the truth, and then decide what to believe and what not to believe. Catherine's five years of mediocrity began when Claire couldn't prove whether she was mentally ill or not, and finally Hal believed that she had written a great mathematical proof even without a logically rigorous argumentation process.
It turns out that it is not hard evidence, but intuitive trust that makes doubts very light and makes problems clear.
"Dad's testimonials are usually terse, mine are long. I want to be as good as him, but I'm afraid of ending up like him," Catherine said.
"Or, you'll become a better person than him," Hal said.
I'm sure Catherine will be better than her father because she said, "Mathematical research is not about inspiration, it's about effort. You have to find the right angle, pull the thread, and then stalk it." Five years of gloomy years in caring for her father , that's how she wrote a testimonial that amazed the world. She doesn't believe in inspiration, and damn it the saying "mathematicians go downhill after 23". This self-confidence distinguishes her from those mathematicians who rely on alcohol and drugs to maintain their academic life. She does not need to live in the panic of Jiang Lang's talents until she can't get to the top.
Of course, this is just an evidence, which is also an unprovable proposition. so what? I choose to trust Catherine.
PS: This is the first time I've seen a movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow, and I have to say she's doing a really good job in this movie. The graceful goddess plays a fragile and sensitive but rebellious mathematical genius, which is really pleasant.
2012/7/21
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