Local mathematicians advise Hollywood
Those cinematic chalkboards full of numbers and letters mashed into unintelligible equations, dashed off by the mad professor in a flight of ideas — who knows what they actually mean?
Jonathan Farley and Tony Harkin do. In fact, they may have been the ones to write them down before the cameras started shooting. The Brockport natives have parlayed their careers as mathematicians into a side business advising film and television producers.
They recently contributed to an episode of Elementary, a modern-day Sherlock Holmes show on CBS. The show’s writers wanted the detective to solve a mystery with the help of Belphegor’s Prime, a particularly spooky 31-digit prime number including the number 666 and two sets of 13 zeros.
They didn’t know how to incorporate it into the script in a realistic way — that’s where Farley and Harkin came in, finding a way to connect it to a set of GPS coordinates.
“It’s hard work,” said Farley, a 1987 graduate of Brockport High School who now teaches math at Morgan State University. “Studios think it’s something minor, but we live in a world where someone can post a negative review online instantly, and that sticks with people.”
Farley created Hollywood Math and Science Film Consulting several years ago; Harkin is the director of the Center for Applied and Computational Mathematics at Rochester Institute of Technology.
Farley has worked on two episodes of Elementary, and on the shows Numb3rs and Medium. He’s filled a notebook with notations, written in several different pen colors to fit a manic mathematician; come up with realistic-sounding academic journal names; and produced math that could be scrawled across a wall.
“Of course, no mathematician would ever do that,” he noted.
There are few professional mathematicians in the entertainment business — Farley knows the man who advised on The Nutty Professor, and the one who filled the chalkboards on Matt Damon’s behalf in Good Will Hunting.
It may seem like a minor detail, but an unrealistic equation or line of dialogue can ruin a film or show for those who know better.
“The worst thing, when you’re putting science or math into a film or television, is for people to say, ‘This doesn’t make any sense,’ ” Farley said. “Our job isn’t to make sure everything is realistic, but to enhance the film and make sure people are entertained. Major, glaring mistakes can take away from that.”
JMURPHY7@DemocratandChronicle.com