Just saw Good Will Hunting for the first time. Good movie and all, but I see this certain theme over and over in movies. And of course our culture has really adopted this theme, this idea that there are brilliant people who have proven advanced mathematical theorems and formulas and such and that they deserve all this merit for "figuring it out". That's bullshit.
I think: the math has always been there, it's here and will always be here. When anybody "proves" something, it's just wiping dirt off of what's already written in stone by... God, or the Universe or Nature. Whatever.
Another related rant:
I hate how school is done. I don't like the system and I hate how math is "taught". Teaching math is antiquated. Students of math should just be allowed to start at ground zero and explore math. We shouldn't be graded on correctness. We should really only have to be taught the notation. Everything else... we really need to learn on our own.
And what kills me is that professors and big whigs know this. They say stuff like, "You've got to feel the physics in your bones" and, "Derive this on your own to really understand what's going on". Okay. Thanks. I would. If I had time to do that. Instead I'm studying for some test because I want a good grade to get to the next math class for that one little dose of insight. That one drop of inspiration that I might hit in some textbook or some lecture.
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