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Welcome to the Scientific American podcast Science Talk posted on August 8, 2013.

I'm Steve Merski. And if you've seen the movie Goodwill Hunting, you've seen John Mighton. He's a Toronto-based mathematician, who was an advisor

to the film, and he appears in it as well, which isn't that much of a stretch because he's a

playwright, too. Maiton founded Jump, which stands for Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies.

It's an organization devoted to educating kids in, you guessed it, math.

Scientific American Mind magazine editor Ingrid Wicklegrin spoke with John by phone.

John, it's really nice of you to be here.

So you're a mathematician.

That's right.

I do research in math in a field called graph theory, which is used a lot in computer science

and other branches of math.

I also sometimes write plays.

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