| Contributed by
Lauren Tubbs
One of the things they changed from the book was that in the series they inserted a narrative about Beth's mother being mentally ill. At one point, they show her burning her doctoral thesis from Cornell, which had the title Monomial Representations and Symmetric Presentations. Later, the mother commits suicide. It is implied that her mother's mental illness causes Beth's drug abuse, and as an adult Beth fears that she too might go insane.
There are two other places where math is mentioned in the series - the head of the orphanage tells Beth's adoptive parents that she is very good at math, and later in high school she is labelled a "brain" for being the only one to know what a binomial is.
While the book makes no such connection between math and insanity and has no real mathematical content, it has some beautiful passages that remind me of studying math, such as:
| (quoted from The Queen's Gambit)
She played mentally through game after game, learning new variations, seeing stylistic differences in offense and defense, biting her lip sometimes in excitement over a dazzling move or a subtlety of position, and at other times wearied by a sense of the hopeless depth of chess, of its endlessness, move after move, threat after threat, complication after complication. She had heard of the genetic code that could shape an eye or hand from passing proteins. Deoxyribonucleic acid. It contained the entire set of instructions for constructing a respiratory system and a digestive one, as well as the grip of an infant's hand. Chess was like that. The geometry of a position could be read and reread and not exhausted of possibility. You saw deeply into this layer of it, but there was another layer beyond that, and another.
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