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freepor

What role did you play in A Beautiful Mind? I.e. who are you?

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Based on [0] and [1] I'd say Professor Dave Bryer.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20121112081753/http://www.telegr...

[1] https://simonsingh.net/media/articles/maths-and-science/erdo...

[2] https://www.imdb.com/name/nm1101413/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t41

Yes, Dave Bayer. I was the math consultant, but it's like joining the circus, once inside you do what you can. For one example, when I was a kid my Mom left out a Time Life book on drugs, and my brother and I were fascinated by the various photographs of spiderwebs made under the influence of different recreational drugs. That idea helped shape the "mad shack" in the film. I was also Russell Crowe's hand double, and I had a speaking part in the pen ceremony.

Russell Crowe's hand double? Does he have bad hands or something?

Not having seen the movie, I'm guessing there are scenes where Crowe needs to write some math, and it just looked more convicing by letting an actual mathematician do it for him.

I personally want to thank you. As a mathematician, I always dislike the way maths is displayed in most movies. It was very refreshing to see students compute De Rham cohomology and discuss Galois theory (if I recall correctly) in a major Hollywood production.

Then again, "It's my turn" has a proof of the snake lemma in it! :-) (but the scene is much less realistic)

Not the OP, but I'm guessing that Syzygies is Professor David Allen Bayer. [0][1]

>Bayer was a mathematics consultant for the film A Beautiful Mind, the biopic of John Nash,

"Syzygies" appears to be a reference to a construct in abstract algebra. [2][3]

Dave Bayer is referenced on the version of the Wikipedia page Erdős–Bacon number dated 03:25, 9 February 2013. [4]

>For a time, the person with the lowest known Erdős–Bacon number was Dave Bayer, mathematical consultant to A Beautiful Mind who was on screen in a minor role in the movie. Rance Howard was also in A Beautiful Mind and in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon to give Bayer a Bacon number of 2. Bayer wrote a paper with Persi Diaconis, who has an Erdős number of 1 due to a jointly authored 1977 Stanford University technical report, later published in a 2004 compilation. As such, Bayer's Erdős–Bacon number is 4. ...

But there is a tsunami of deletions [5] by Wikipedia User:Cresix [6] on that day, and the text above plus a table that references Dave Bayer is gone.

[0] https://simonsingh.net/media/articles/maths-and-science/erdo...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Bayer

[2] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~bayer/papers/

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert%27s_syzygy_theorem

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Erd%C5%91s%E2%80%...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cresix

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