A group of Dartmouth mathematics professors is spending its federal grant money in a silly way.
The professors are using part of a $4 million National Science Foundation grant to produce four movies designed to make calculus more fun for students. The movies are being filmed on campus, and the group hopes to sell them to universities and high schools in the next year.
"It's really funny," according to mathematics professor Dorothy Wallace, who is leading the project. "Its my hope that kids will watch a calculus video instead of Beavis and Butt-head."
The four films will feature drama major Mary-Lynn Ring '98 and Josh Kornbluth, the Princeton mathematician and comedian.
The films have "very loose plots," according to Wallace. In one, Kornbluth and Ring are dressing for a formal ball. Wallace gets dressed by explaining the mathematical definition of a limit: As his definition becomes more formal, so does his attire.
Wallace ends up wearing a tuxedo, and the film's final scene shows him and Ring arriving at the formal. The film uses the College President's house on Webster Avenue as a backdrop.
The math department has hired an assortment of private consultants to produce the film, so it should appear very professional, Wallace said.
Ring said she prepared for her role in an unusual way: by "digging out the calculus books."
Ring, a transfer student, appeared in other films when she was a student at New York University. She performed in the Hopkins Center for the Performing Arts production of Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia" this summer.
The films combine instructional segments with pieces from Kornbluth's one-man show, "Mathematics of Change," which appeared at the Hopkins Center last January.
Ring said the films will be helpful to students.
"It will definitely be good," she said. "The video was humorous and applied math to everyday situations."
Although the films will be shown in classes, they will never replace lectures.
"After all, you can't just ask Josh Kornbluth a question" in the film, Wallace said.
