The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Season 2-3 2017
See the parts from Season 1.
Here is an other hilarious seminar part from Episode 3 in Season 2.
The eager students want to know about Cantor. Instead, Weissman feeds them
information about Poincare and Zeno. Mr Weissman then then picks up his wife
(the mother of the protagonist of the series) at the art department,
where he faints, seeing the painting model. The board shows a power series
approach to solving differential equations. Well, this is what applied
mathematicians often do. The deflection from Cantor to Poincare also is
ominous, as Poincare once called Cantor's set theory a disease.
The second scene from Episode 6 in Season 2 plays at Bell lab and
features some speech synthesis, AI. Weissman brings his son and wants to
pitch him a job only to learn that his son is involved in much more important
projects already. On the board, one can also see Banach-Tarski.
The third scene is from Episode 9 in Season 2. Things do not go well for Weissman,
both at Bell labs as well as in school. In the last scene from Episode 7 in Season 3,
there are some nice vector calculus identities on the board. Obviously the script writers
wanted to contrast the disaster pedagogy of Weissmann with modern pedagogy. [It exposes
also some pitfalls of having an elite of selected students working on the board: (I had been exposed to such
pedagogy already in the 80ies myself, enjoyed the plenary lectures given by experts very much
and often got heebi-jeebies in seminar type problem sessions, where the class dynamics did not work because
for example a smarty pant student is using the entire hour to write down some nonsense).
The pitfalls with having students work on the board are that in such frameworks,
some eager hyperactive students (Truman in the movie is of that type) dominate and frustrate the rest.
Not many teachers have the quickness of mind, flexibility and psychological talent to handle such a classroom
and also can reach the goal to get the entire class to where they need to go like being ready for the
high demands of other sciences.
Oliver Knill, Posted February 5-8, 2021,