Films about math: a question about math education and motivation for learning math

Question

I'm interested in movies about or related with mathematics or physics, I mean not documentaries which I also consider movies, but artistic or mainstream films about math. Now I have the following in mind:

1. Aronofsky Pi
2. Madden Proof
3. Van Sant Good Will Hunting
4. Mervyn LeRoy Madame Curie

I think those kinds of movies are inspirational stuff; I mean for kids to get interested in the power of modern mathematics. For example, I think a realistic-fiction movie about Perelman or Feynman would be very interesting and inspirational for everyone.

What stories you remind and what scientific stories would you like to see in a film?

Personally, I would like to see Grothendieck, Perelman, Claude Shannon, Janos von Neumann or Gödel. I totally think the question belongs here, is a question about math trough inspirational stuff that can rely on math education.

Answer 1

A short film called Rites of love and math by Edward Frenkel

Answer 2

My three favourite math movies are Proof, Good Will Hunting and A Beautiful Mind. I have watched each over 9000 times!

Answer 3

In addition to the favorites Will Hunting mentions, I also love Little Man Tate. I could so relate, and it touches on the humanity behind genius.

One site maintained by A.G. Reinhold is Math in the Movies. See also his linked page Mathematicians in the Movies, a webpage dedicated to films about mathematicians, including Feymenn, (also Einstein)! Included, e.g., is a film about Alan Turing: "Breaking the Code."

Reinhold's site also provides a link to a page listing feedback and suggestions he has received from others, Letters to Math in the Movies. For example, see Stand and Deliver. This is an inspiring movie! And it is based on a true story, directly relevant to math education (as it is about a high school mathematics class in urban LA, and the teacher that inspired them).

• Consider, also Fermat, BBC's documentary on Prof. Wiles' proof of Fermat's last therorem.

• Also N is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős.

---

In terms of what/who I'd like to see a motion picture devoted to: I'd like to see a motion picture and/or documentary about Georg Cantor, whose work was not not well received by many of his time, but nonetheless, revolutionized mathematics.

Also, consider the work of Ian Stewart: Symmetry, The Mathematics of Life, and others could make for wonderful films, and Stewart has written a lot of fiction as well. Perhaps he might be encouraged to work with a screenwriter to develop a screenplay based on one or more of his books.

---

Disclaimer: Documentarty!

See The Story of Maths, a four-part documentary presented by Oxford professor Marcus du Sautoy.

A synopsis of the fourth episode, e.g.:

The fourth episode, To Infinity and Beyond, concludes the series. After exploring Georg Cantor’s work on infinity and Henri Poincaré’s work on chaos theory, he looks at how mathematics was itself thrown into chaos by the discoveries of Kurt Gödel, who showed that the unknowable is an integral part of maths, and Paul Cohen, who established that there were several different sorts of mathematics in which conflicting answers to the same question were possible. He concludes his journey by considering the great unsolved problems of mathematics today, including the Riemann Hypothesis, a conjecture about the distribution of prime numbers. A million dollar prize and a place in the history books await anyone who can prove Riemann’s theorem.

Answer 4

Maybe this site will help as it has a bunch of movies that had anything math related: http://www.math.harvard.edu/~knill/mathmovies/

Also, http://www.imdb.com/list/0sB16SJc2u4/

Others: http://www.math.unl.edu/~bharbourne1/MathInTheMovies.html

http://world.std.com/~reinhold/mathmovies.html

http://www.qedcat.com/moviemath/index.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_about_mathematicians

Answer 5

If you are into Musical comedy, there is Fermat's Last Tango which I found pretty funny.

The lyrics "And your proof contains a big fat hole" stays long enough in your head once you've heard it ;)

Answer 6

Fermat's Room (La habitación de Fermat) is a Spanish thiller with a sequence of mathematical puzzles which need to be solved so the characters are not squashed.

Answer 7

A film which was well received and might interest you is "The death of a neapolitan mathematician" (Morte di un matematico napoletano, an italian film---details easily recoverable on IMDB). This is a feature film (not a documentary) on the tragic last days of the mathematician Renato Cacciopoli---apart from his mathematical achievements, his was a life story which makes that of most fictional characters seem boringly banal.