Twenty-year-old Will Hunting of South Boston is a self-taught genius, though he works as a janitor at MIT and spends his free time drinking with his friends Chuckie, Billy, and Morgan. When Professor Gerald Lambeau posts a difficult mathematics problem on a blackboard as a challenge for his graduate students, Will solves the problem anonymously, stunning both the students and Lambeau. As a challenge to the unknown genius, Lambeau posts an even more difficult problem. Will flees when Lambeau catches him writing the solution on the blackboard late at night. At a bar, Will meets Skylar, a British woman about to graduate from Harvard College, who plans on attending medical school at Stanford.