Is this Chinese delivery worker a real-life 'Good Will Hunting'?

Chinese migrant worker Yu Jianchun has solved a complex math problem with implications for computer science and information security. Yu is being called a real-life version of the movie character played by Matt Damon in 1997.

|
Courtesy of Miramax
In the 1997 movie 'Good Will Hunting,' Matt Damon played the role of a janitor at MIT who was also a self-taught mathematical genius.

“I 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.”

When it comes to advanced math and science, says Will Hunting, the character played by Matt Damon in the 1997 Oscar-winning drama “Good Will Hunting,” “I could always just play.” 

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 represent an exciting discovery for the field of Carmichael numbers, William Banks,  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, seeking confirmation of his formulas. 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, invited him to present his solutions to four math problems at a public seminar. Professor Cai also plans to publish Yu’s theory in a book on Carmichael numbers.

It was a very imaginative solution. He has never received any systematic training in number theory nor taken advanced math classes,” Cai told CNN. “All he has is an instinct and an extreme sensitivity to numbers.”

Yu told CNN he was “overwhelmed with joy” to discover a solution completely different from the classic algorithm for identifying the “pseudoprimes.” Carmichael numbers pass Fermat’s 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, 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. Carmichael numbers, which begin 561, 1105, 1729, 2465, etc., also play an important role for computer science and information security.

"I made my discoveries through intuition," 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. 

After his findings made the news, Yu became a local celebrity and Silk Road Holding Group, a company based in Huzhou, offered to employ him in a statistics-related position.

The job would "give him better development for a career and also more time for furthering his interest and talent in mathematics,” Ling Lanfang, president of the group, told China Daily.

Yu says he hasn’t seen "Good Will Hunting," but his study of math may have familiarized him with another real-life math genius mentioned in the film, Srinivasa Ramanujan.

In the movie, therapist Sean Maguire, played by 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’s 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 "by a process of mingled argument, intuition, and induction, of which he was entirely unable to give any coherent account," Hardy described. "I have never met his equal."

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Is this Chinese delivery worker a real-life 'Good Will Hunting'?
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0719/Is-this-Chinese-delivery-worker-a-real-life-Good-Will-Hunting
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe