Is this Chinese delivery worker a real-life 'Good Will Hunting'?
鈥淚 look at a piano, I see a bunch of keys, three pedals, and a box of wood. But Beethoven, Mozart, they saw it, they could just play.鈥�
When it comes to advanced math and science, says Will Hunting, the character played by Matt Damon in the 1997 Oscar-winning drama 鈥淕ood Will Hunting,鈥� 鈥淚 could always just play.鈥澛�
His character, a janitor with an innate mathematical prowess, could see the solutions that eluded MIT students.
Today, in China, a real-life Will Hunting is generating excitement and awe. Yu Jianchun, a Chinese package delivery worker without a college degree, has developed a new method to identify Carmichael numbers that reflects a creative look at a problem that has long stumped mathematicians.
His solution inspired praise from academics around the globe, and, if verified, could , William Banks, 聽a mathematician at the University of Missouri who works with Carmichael numbers told CNN.
Yu, a migrant worker from the mountainous Henan province, visited local universities in each new city he found work, . He had been emailing prominent Chinese mathematicians with the newly-developed Carmichael formulas for eight years to no avail, until Cai Tianxin, a math professor at Zhejiang University,聽 at a public seminar. Professor Cai also plans to publish Yu鈥檚 theory in a book on Carmichael numbers.
鈥�. He has never received any systematic training in number theory nor taken advanced math classes,鈥� Cai told CNN. 鈥淎ll he has is an instinct and an extreme sensitivity to numbers.鈥�
Yu told CNN he was 鈥溾�� to discover a solution completely different from the classic algorithm for identifying the 鈥減seudoprimes.鈥� Carmichael numbers pass Fermat鈥檚 test for prime numbers, even though they don't meet the criteria for prime numbers, since they're divisible by more than 1 and themselves,聽making it more complicated to identify true prime numbers. R. D. Carmichael discovered 15 examples in 1910 and theorized that there were infinitely many.
As mathematicians discover increasingly large prime numbers, they're focused on sorting them out from the numbers that appear to be prime at first examination. , which begin , etc., also play an important role for .
"," Yu told China Topix. "I would write down what I thought when inspirations struck about the Carmichael. I have hard work and make a hard living, but I insist on my studies."
Yu likely won't have to limit mathematics to his free time any longer.聽
After his findings made the news, Yu became a local celebrity聽and Silk Road Holding Group, a company based in Huzhou, offered to employ him in a statistics-related position.
The job would " and also more time for furthering his interest and talent in mathematics,鈥� Ling Lanfang, president of the group, told China Daily.
Yu says he hasn鈥檛 seen "Good Will Hunting," but his study of math may have familiarized him with another real-life math genius mentioned in the film,聽Srinivasa Ramanujan.
In the movie, therapist Sean Maguire, played by聽Robin Williams, compares Will with the self-taught Mr. Ramanujan, who made extraordinary contributions to number theory and infinite series despite having almost no formal training in pure mathematics.
Born in South India, Ramanujan was a college dropout from a poor family who filled notebooks of mathematical discoveries that he mailed off to prominent math scholars in India and England. He was dismissed repeatedly as a hoax.
Just as Yu鈥檚 scattershot method of reaching out to academics eventually connected him with Cai, Ramanujan found a mentor in Cambridge University mathematician G. H. Hardy, who recognized his genius and invited him to England
Ramanujan arrived at his answers ", of which he was entirely unable to give any coherent account," Hardy described. "I have never met his equal."
