Often movies include scenes showing math. Often, the math is on a blackboard or whiteboard in a character’s room or office, or in the background of the credits roll at the end of the show. The intended effect is, I guess, to tell the audience “this character is a genius of some sort, he or she is going to provide the hero with some amazing invention or information that will help defeat the villain”.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
As a mathematician, I try to quickly read the math on the whiteboard. Sometimes, it makes no sense – as if it’s just a scrawl of random letters. Other times it’s a collection of unrelated – but individually correct – mathematical statements. Rarely is it a typical mathematician’s whiteboard, showing a coherent set of ideas following one from the other.<\/p>\n
(By the way, when I say “mathematician’s whiteboard” I don’t mean to imply that all mathematicians keep a whiteboad around the house. That stereotype is completely wrong. For example, I just sold my whiteboard, so I don’t have one.)<\/p>\n
Still, it doesn’t matter too much, in a movie, if the math doesn’t make sense. Nobody cares that the physics in, say, 2012<\/a> or Armageddon<\/a> doesn’t make sense. Admittedly, I was particularly disappointed by one show where the kids in a school formed a math club, and advertised it with a banner showing the digis of pi – but got the digits wrong.<\/p>\n Does math – even nonsense math – really make the characters in a movie look smarter?<\/p>\n According to new research, described here<\/a>, math in a research paper makes the researcher look smarter. The researchers asked college research staff and students to evaluate some short descriptions of research in anthropology and sociology. They had insterted a nonsense math equation into some of the descriptions. The descriptions with the nonsense math were rated as better research than the descriptions with no math.<\/p>\n Importantly, the nonsense math did not boost the evaluations if the evalator was trained in a field such as mathematics, technology, science or medicine.<\/p>\n So perhaps you can impress your boss by adding an equation or two to your reports. Just make sure the equations make sense, or one day you’ll get caught!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Often movies include scenes showing math. Often, the math is on a blackboard or whiteboard in a character’s room or office, or in the background of the credits roll at the end of the show. The intended effect is, I guess, to tell the audience “this character is a genius of some sort, he or … Continue reading Does Math Make You Seem Smarter?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[425,31,423,424,303],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1323,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions\/1323"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-mikes-math-games-for-kids.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}