This was an interesting movie, good for mathematical people, I would say. Reminds me of the story of Kurt Gödel, who also went crazy.
This movie made me wonder, did his disorder allow him to see patters better than anyone else? I recommend this movie for mostly adults. There is some good humor to it, but it is hard to get emotionally attached to this movie.
Views of Princeton and Harvard are nice, but the math is aimed to be completely clouded to those not in graduate mathematics, like Reinmann Zeta functions and Real and Complex analyses.
What he was doing with newspapers and magazines was very interesting though, and I do not know what he was trying to figure out from that. It is all random distribution of numbers and letters, why was he trying to connect them? I mean, yes, it is addicting to do that, but completely futile.
Ron Howard sure did a jump from his previous movies to do this, but I think he did a good job. I really think that Nash's roommate was interesting.
It is also interesting that Nash is still alive and is still at Princeton University. I went to his website and it seems he in messing around with the Goldbach Conjecture in Mathematica. This is a famous unsolved problem that is around 400 years old. It has now made it into the world book of records after Andrew Wiles solved Fermat's last Theorem by way of the 40-50 year old problem the Taniyama Shimura Conjecture.
There are million dollar prizes offered for the solutions and proof of many of these problems, but they are not really solvable by any simple mathematics, you must get a graduate education at least, and then you could even spend the rest of your life on them and still get no where. If my memory serves me right, the Goldbach conjecture is stated thus: Every even number greater that 4 is the sum of two primes. (a prime being divisible by only 1 and itself) Sure, you can start checking it, like 2+3=5, but can you PROVE that this is always the case? There is no known pattern or formula for primes, and the deeper you dig into this problem, you see that you must prove an infinity on top of an infinity. It is very hard.
On computers, however, the Goldbach Conjecture had been proven for thousands of even numbers, yet that is NOT a proof. All that tells us is that the Conjecture works for up to that many even numbers. We need it up to infinity, but that cannot be done on a computer because computers cannot candle infinity. (Ever tired dividing by zero on a calculator?)
I hope that others like this movie, but it wasn't that surprising to me because I already knew all about Nash's life. If I wouldn't have been in mathematics, I probably would have enjoyed this movie for its surprises much more.


Recommended:
Yes