A Beautiful Mind Compared to the Independent Film Proof

These two movies have a semi-related basis as well as an overall plot. The main character in A Beautiful Mind is John Forbes Nash Jr., a mathematical genius and creator of proof of rational behavior who suffers from schizophrenia as well as being a delusional man up until he snaps out of his delirium in 1994 when he wins the Nobel Prize for Economics. The two main mathematicians in "Proof" is a brilliant young woman named Catherine, who is prone to depression, and her parasitic father, a once-admired mathematician who has suffered a mental crackup similarly, but not illness related, to John Nash. Catharine stayed with her father

While one deals with probing the mind of a crazy mathematician, the other deals with issues of a daughter of a crazy mathematician and her own struggles. Catherine begins to wonder if she may have inherited her father's mental illness along with his ingenious math skills. The serious conflicts begin to break the ice when Catharine becomes an unreliable and incredible source of the only journal that does matter; was it her or her dad's?

Catharine and her father Robert spend days and days formulating arithmetical theorems in "connect-the-dot" fashions to find a proof. The devastating moment came when Catharine comes home to her father who thinks he has found the proof they have spent a life time creating. She is astonished but merely devastated after reading what he had put forth his once ingenious mind to; a notebook full with pages of somewhat logical but ludicrous nonsense of rambling equations about the seasons and cold and this and that. Catharine couldn't believe her eyes and couldn't help but cry. But this could mean that she is the author of the only journal that was proof and that did have a value and significance to be a renowned theorem as Hal figured out.