Good Will Hunting: a mathematician’s review
Good Will Hunting, reviewed by Mark E. Saul in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, April 1998. (The most interesting part is Daniel Kleitman’s box on “My Career in the Movies”; also, please read the book review of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time if you’ve read the book.)
It feels very good to read the Notices. All its issues since 1995 are available online.
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The book review of The Curious Incident… was very engaging. I found the book in some Readers Digest anthology- this was before I’d heard about it anywhere- and was moved to tears by the end.
I was wondering where I’d seen the author’s name before- digging through my bookmarks, I realized Aslaksen has the most accessible trove (online) of information on the confusing Indian calendar.
Anonymous
Tue, 2009-03-17 at 07:20:45
Thanks for the link! I too find calendars fascinating… that’s a treasure trove indeed.
Shreevatsa
Tue, 2009-03-17 at 13:16:13
Heh, quoting from that page:
The Indian calendars are very interesting, but very complicated. […] They are probably the most complicated calendars currently used in the world.
Yes, complicated perhaps, but thousands (millions?) of Indians can compute and work with them quite comfortably.
He goes on to say, on When is Deepavali (Diwali)?:
Deepavali is a national public holiday in India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Mauritius, Fiji, Malaysia and Singapore. […]
In Singapore, the Hindu Endowments Board only makes an estimate of the date of Deepavali, and waits for calendars from India to appear before the date of the public holiday is confirmed by the Ministry of Manpower. Unfortunately, those estimates are often wrong, and the date for the holiday has to be reviesed after the start of the year. This has happened four times since 2002.
Shreevatsa
Fri, 2009-08-21 at 23:17:59