Question: When Will is discovered by the professor, he is solving a math problem using what appear to be stick figures. Is there a branch of mathematics that deals with these stick figures?
nightline
18th May 2004
Good Will Hunting (1997)
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Answer: I looked at it and it seems to be a graph-theoretical problem. Graph theory is a branch of mathematics dealing with figures that look like stick figures (which can be interpreted for example as streets connecting cities, and one tries to find the shortest way from one city to another). The exact problem is to give all the possible unique trees with 10 points, without redundant connections.
nightline