I borrowed-without-asking the office’s DVD of the movie Hard Problems and watched it tonight. (Don’t worry, I’ll bring it back on Monday. I doubt that anyone missed it.)

There is not much inciteful commentary that I can give about it. It is a documentary about the 2006 International Mathematical Olympiad. There are a lot of interviews with nerdy high school kids. Also lots of interviews with their parents, some of whom seem to doth protest too much about not putting pressure on their kids to excel. (On the other hand, the mom who named her kids Zarathustra and Galadriel was pretty convincing in her claims that she just lets them do their own things.) If you happen to have a copy of this movie lying around your office, I would certainly recommend it as a worthwhile way to spend 82 minutes sitting on your couch with your cats on a Saturday night.

There was also one work-related idea that I got from watching the bonus features, but I’m going to wait until after I return the DVD to the office to talk to my colleagues about it.

For me, the most interesting part of the movie was that I knew a bunch of people in it. This is entirely because I have spent decent chunks of the past 11 years working with high achieving high school students in one way or another. Even more interesting (well, interesting to me) was which people I could recognize by looking at them and which people I could only recognize by hearing them talk. I was able to recognize on sight someone who I saw at a conference a few years ago. But someone who worked in my office last summer, I only recognized by his voice. (If you want to develop a theory about which people I recognize and which ones I don’t, it will need to include the true fact that on one occasion in real life I did not recognize my own brother.)

The cats did not seem particularly interested in the film. Gwen doesn’t like movies in general, and Sophie is somewhat fickle.