“Rare Greek Variables”, 2021-11-28 (; backlinks; similar):
One of John Nash’s first papers deliberately used every Greek letter.
For the film A Beautiful Mind I used this paper for writing on his dorm room window. As luck would have it, a widely circulated publicity still showed Russell Crowe intent behind “0 < π < 1” taken straight from that paper.
Suffice to say this was divisive within the math community. Half of us can’t imagine Pi meaning anything besides, um, Pi. The other half didn’t even blink.
Someone shared with me a hilarious email exchange within the Berkeley math department, wondering if the math consultant was deliberately trying to make Russell Crowe look bad.
I got the chance to edit an interview with John Nash for the DVD extras, where he bragged to Ron Howard about using every Greek letter. I left that in.
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