Math in the Movies
from
http://world.std.com/~reinhold/mathmovies.html
I hated the first half of this
movie. The caricature of cryptography, right out of "Mercury
Rising," made me squirm. I was tempted to walk out, but I had this
review to write, so fortunately I stayed. The second half was wonderful and made
complete sense of Act I. All those Hollywood spy cliches turn out to be a
brilliant device to let us see what happens from from John
Nash's perspective.
There is one good math scene
where Nash and some fellow grad students are in a bar and a bevy of young women
walk in, lead by a very attractive blonde. Nash realizes that all the guys
hitting on the blonde would not be an optimal strategy and that this dating
situation is a counter example to the claims of classical economic theory. The
insight leads to his Nobel-prize
winning result. If true, this would be the best eureka yarn since Newton and
the apple. Otherwise the math was a little weak. Lots of scrawled equations do
not a math movie make. More of an explanation of Nash's
work would have been welcome.
A Beautiful Mind is also one
of the finest love stories ever filmed. After reading how Andrew
Wiles enjoyed the full support of his wife while holed up in his attic for
seven years proving Fermat's Last Theorem, I thought there should a hall of fame
for great spouses of mathematicians. Mrs. Nash could be another charter member. PG-13
(One mild bedroom scene, guys on the make, high emotional intensity)
Math ***
Movie *****
Winner of 4
Academy Awards (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, Best
Adapted Script) with 8 nominations.
Leaving the Wilbur Theater in
Boston after seeing Proof, a theatergoer remarked "This is the year of
mathematicians." OK, so Proof is not a movie, it's a Tony and Pulitzer
winning play by David Auburn. But three of the four characters are
mathematicians. The father character is loosely based on John Nash, but the
story is fiction and takes a very different path from A Beautiful Mind, focusing
on the daughter.
The title is apt. Proof's plot
is filed with attempts to prove things: sanity, love, correctness of care
decisions, theorems, authorship, adulthood to an older sibling. Even the
champaign bottle in the first scene is a mysterious counterexample.
In particular, the play asks
if proof checking can be an act of love. Checking is violent work. You must try
to demolish someone else's creation. But what if you love that person? Is it
better to trust condescendingly or to seek the truth and resolve any doubts?
Proof's themes are universal,
but the emotional life of mathematicians is dealt with well. Stereotypes are
dissected. The math jokes aren't great but it's fun to hear the two waves of
laughter: from the people who get them immediately and those that have to wait
for the playwright's explanation. Proof's ending is mathematically satisfying.
NYU's Courant Institute
hosted a symposium on Proof. OK for older kids. (There's a seduction
scene, of course.)
Math ***
Play ****
I haven't seen this musical
play about Wiles' proof (featuring songs like "There's a Big Fat Hole
in your Proof" and "Math Widow"), but it is available on VHS
video tape and DVD from the Clay
Institute and there is a fine review of it in the Notices
of the AMS.
In the opening scene of this
romantic comedy, Jill Clayburgh, playing a mathematics professor, proves the
"snake lemma" of homological algebra:
0 -> A -> B -> C -> 0
| | |
0 -> A'-> B'-> C'-> 0
to an obnoxious graduate student. To the best of our knowledge, this is the
most erudite mathematical scene in a major motion picture, though spoiled
somewhat by a heavy handed portrayal of the grad student. The rest of the film
is mostly math-free,
unfortunately. R
Math ****
Film ***
Dustin Hoffman has moved to his wife's home town in Cornwall, England in the
hope of getting some astrophysics done. His bored wife's flirtations lead to
serious trouble. Somewhere along the line she mischievously changes a plus sign
to a minus sign in a set of gravitational equations on a blackboard. Hoffman's
response when he finally notices is by far the best and most realistic portrayal
of a mathematician in action in the movies.
Caution: The moral of this film is "don't mess with a mathematician," so,
as you might expect, a great deal of violence occurs. R
Math ****
Film ****
The U.S.
FBI has lobbied for legislation that would prevent your use of cryptography
unless the Government can instantly access your unencoded messages. Similar
threats exist in other countries. In the long run, it is impossible to suppress
cryptography without restricting mathematical research and teaching. Our CipherSaber
page demonstrates this by showing how little knowledge is required to build a
strong encryption program.
Fight the Crypto Ban with Cybersaber!
We'll tell you how.
Good
Will Hunting (1997)
Like its Fields-medalist
Salieriesqe math
professor, this movie begins by putting a hard problem on the blackboard: Can
anyone save a defiant, troubled kid from working-class South
Boston who happens to be a Ramanujan-level
genius?
But instead of a convincing solution, we get easy answers. Robbin William's
soberly played shrink brushes past Hunting's intelligence to get at his abusive
childhood, never contemplating genius as an equal source of pain. The women are
either on a pedestal or deserve to be. The movie plinks every soft target that
gets in it sights: gullible psychotherapists, corporate recruiters, snotty
Harvard students, the NSA, even MIT
custodial foremen.
The film's best aspect is the love and care lavished on getting South Boston
right. If they had only done as well by the mathematicians, depicted here as
corporate, arrogant, joyless and cold. The movie shows the outside of MIT, but
not the inside.
There is so much talent here that I want to give an Incomplete and make them
turn in a more thoughtful version next semester. Too bad serious movies don't
get sequels.
R (mostly for foul language it would seem)
Math *
Film ***
Note: Bert Jagers created a Maple worksheet on the math in Good Will
Hunting:
http://www.math.utwente.nl/~jagers/Will.html
This a movie about madness, not mathematics. The math, computer science,
theology, and pharmacology are bad. (One faux pas is a suggestion that one could
try all possible 216 digit numbers.) But they are brilliantly combined with
music, and camera work to place us in the tormented mind of a paranoid obsessive
seeking the central truth of the universe --which is excreted by computers just
before they melt down -- while he is pursued by Wall Street brokers and Hassidic
Jews who know he is onto something. See the
Pi page for more links. R
Math *
Gematria **
Film ***
Robin Williams explains Newton's Law of Gravitation to a life drawing class
in this '90s remake of the 1961 Absent
Minded Professor, and there is a lot of pseudo-science in the background --
even the titles are filled with math symbology. But the story has been
whimsyectomized: the long suffering girlfriend, promoted to college president,
really suffers, the professor feels her pain, the goons are scary, and there is
a poignant death scene. If the Professor can make a robot fly, why does he need
flubber? Still, the movie-clip-emoting robot redeems the movie, out cuteing
R2D2. Weebo deserved an Oscar for best
supporting actress. PG
Math **
Film ***
This space reserved for Unabomber
- The Movie
"Math didn't make him kill, it just made him hard to catch."
(It seems there was a TV docudrama Unabomber:
The True Story (1996) )
Tom Hanks plays a twelve year old boy whose wish to be big is granted by a
magical arcade game. His ability to find work and even succeed mocks the adult
world. At a dinner party, Hanks helps the young son, whom the real adults are
ignoring, with his homework. In the process he offers a nice explanation of
basic algebra. PG
Math ***
Film *****
A high school math teacher, played by Edward James Olmos, gets a group of
inner city kids to learn calculus, amazing and threatening the educational
establishment. Some decent calculus teaching is shown in this true story. PG
Math ***
Film ****
A
Brief History of Time (1992)
Biography of one of our greatest living physicsts, Stephen
Hawking, though a bit light on his work. G
Math ***
Film ****
Freelance spies track down an all powerful code breaking chip developed by a
mysteriously funded mathematician named Gunter Janek. In a brief scene, the
long-haired, white-suited Janek lectures on the possibility of finding a faster
way to factor numbers, shouting lots of big math words, but not really
explaining anything. Still, the film correctly points out that a breakthrough in
factoring could happen and would be worth a lot to criminals and people who
break codes. The
mathematician Len Adleman advised on the making of this move. Click
here for his story. PG-13
Math **
Film ***
Mel Gibson plays a former teacher turned recluse whose face is badly
disfigured. He befriends a troubled boy and helps him prepare for a military
school's entrance exam. In one of his lessons, Gibson shows the boy how to find
the center of any circle by constructing the perpendicular bisectors of two
chords. The figure he draws isn't quite general enough: the chords share a
common point and they needn't. But that's the least of their troubles as the
secret of Gibson's past comes back to haunt their relationship. PG-13
Math ***
Film ****
In this somewhat morbid chronicle of five generations of sturdy women, we
see Antonia's granddaughter Theresa, who grows from a child prodigy to become a
mathematician, lecturing on cohomology and reading a monograph on differential
geometry in preference to nursing her baby. In a movie filled with stereotypes,
we should not expect a woman mathematician to be anything but cold. One nit:
Theresa says "X comma A" while reading a diagram during her lecture
scene but it appears in the subtitles as "X.A". The translators must
habitually change European commas into English decimal points. Dutch. Unrated,
Quite a bit of S.ex and Violence
Math ***
Film ****
Die
Hard: With A Vengeance (1995)
Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson are given a five gallon jug and a three
gallon jug, and must put exactly four gallons of water on a scale to keep a bomb
from exploding. R
Math ***
Film ***
The
Mirror has Two Faces (1996)
Hunk math prof Jeff Bridges explains the Twin Prime Conjecture (that there
are infinitely many pairs of primes only two numbers apart) to dowdy english
prof Barbara Streisand who actually gets it. She critiques his calculus
teaching. Bridges proposes. I thought the "before" Straisand was
cuter. PG-13
Math ***
Film ***
Remake of Le
Miroir a Deux Faces (1959)
Trivia question: what is the relationship between the Twin Prime Conjecture
and the infamous floating point bug in Intel's original Pentium chip? Click
here to find out.
Jodie Foster is perfect when she defines prime numbers for a group of
Washington bigwigs and is greeted by blank stares. But why does the movie have
to work so hard explaing her devotion to science? The book's nonsense about pi
is not in the movie. PG
Math ***
Film ****
Real Men Do Count
If we had a dollar for every war movie made, we could afford a T1 Internet
connection. Yet almost every soldier flick is predictable: If the movie has a
happy ending, the heroes win a few in the beginning, then start losing until the
very end when they win the big battle, but the supporting actor is killed. If
it's a tragedy, they lose in the beginning, win in the middle, lose the big one
and the star dies. Good military tactics never seem to play any part in
the outcome. We know of only two movies where the heroes even bother to count
how many of the enemy are out there. These movies are:
The
Seven Samurai (1954) (Shichinin no Samurai)
Akira Kurosawa's masterful story of a 16th century Japanese village that
defends itself by hiring down-and-out samurai. The wisest teaches his comrades
in arms to plan. Japanese. No rating. Fairly violent.
Math ***
Film *****
Clint Eastwood leads an all star cast in search of Nazi gold. But first they
have to take out the German tanks one at a time. How do they know when they're
all gone? They counted them first, silly. PG
Math **
Film ****
Computers in the Movies
The Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota beat me to this
one. They have a list, "Hollywood
and Computers", of 42
movies with computers in them. But here is one they missed:
Dr.
Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963)
If you want to know what a scientific computer looked like in the good old
days, see Stanley Kubrick's classic satire on nuclear doomsday with its fine
scenes of an IBM 7094/ 1401
installation. Peter Sellers almost saves the world with a transistor radio
hidden in a 1403 printer.Unrated. OK, I think, for older teens
Computer ***
Film *****
Movies in Mathematics
Here is a paper http://www.siam.org/siamnews/11-01/networks.pdf
that discusses the properties of the Kevin Bacon Graph (KBG), whose nodes are
actors in major motion pictures (as listed at imdb.com) and where each node is
connected by an edge iff the two actors appeared together in a film.
Interestingly, its largest connected component contains 90% of all actors.
A Hill on the Dark Side of the
Moon (1983)
( Berget paa maanens baksida (1983))
Roger Cooke asks "how in the world did you overlook [this] story of Sonya
Kovalevskaya's stay in Sweden--advertised as the feminist movie of
the 1980's. Actually, as a female colleague said to me after seeing it, 'That
movie says that to be a female mathematician you have to be ugly, neurotic, and
a bad mother.' Since I have spent considerable time researching and writing
about Kovalevskaya, I concur. Mathematically they missed the point entirely
about Kovalevskaya. On the plus side, where else would you see actors portraying
Weierstrass and Mittag-Leffler?"
"On the personal side, they also got it wrong. I remember thinking Meg
Ryan was hardly the ideal actress to play Einstein's brilliant niece in IQ,
but she'd have been about right physically (with her hair dyed brown) to play
Kovalevskaya. Instead they got an extremely homely Swedish actress to play the
part, and they made her a temperamental prima donna at her first lecture in
Stockholm. Actually, she was diffident to the extreme, and always afraid she
wasn't doing a good enough job. As for my colleague's comments, well,
Kovalevskaya was neurotic and a bad mother, but she wasn't ugly. A
century after her death, though, she still leaves a legacy of two very brilliant
mathematical results." Search google.com
with the key word " Kovalevskaya" for more resources about her.
" P.S. There is a mountain on the far side of the moon that the Soviets
named after Kovalevskaya (their robot space ship [Luna
3] was the first to photograph the far side of the moon). I presume that's
the reason for the title, though no reference is made to it in the movie, either
at the beginning or the end."
Sweden 7 (~PG)
Math ?
Film ?
Walter Matthau as Albert
Einstein plays matchmaker for his niece played by Meg Ryan. Judy Ann Brown's
favorite scene is where Meg Ryan attempts to explain to Tim Robbins why she
can't dance with him: she can only walk half the distance between them and then
half again and half again and she will never reach him. Rhiju Das was impressed
when Meg Ryan's character puts the Schrodinger equation on the board, in
operator form.PG
Math **
Film ***
This dark, nihilistic film has generated the most letters
to Math in the Movies. A group of people are trapped in a nightmare lattice
of cubic rooms and have to figure out how to escape. Cartesian coordinates and
prime numbers play a key role. The moral: factor or die! The most interesting
math here is in thinking about how they made the movie. R brutal
violence, language
Math **
Film **
Death
of a Neapolitan Mathematician (Morte di un Matematico Napoletano) (1992)
Laura Parigi, from Florence, Italy and Dan Schnabel suggest this Italian
movie, written and directed by Mario Martone. It's the story of an important
Italian mathematician looking at the last week of his life before he kills
himself in 1959. I haven't seen it yet. Unrated
Math ?
Film ?
Jon Reeves says you must see, this biopic about Richard
Feynman. There's a priceless scene where he has a calculating duel with a
guy with an abacus. Feynman, using pencil and paper, adds a bit slower, but
multiplies slightly faster, and really whips him in the cube root competition.
Afterward, he explains it all to his fiancee. PG
Math ?
Film ?
Subject *****
A bright 8-year-old is placed in a program for gifted children. Edie Bennett
liked the scene where a teacher has several odd and even numbers on the board
and asks how many of them are divisible by 2. Tate raises his hand and answers
"All of them." PG
Math **
Film ****
Tel Lekatsas points out that financier Michael Douglas, after buying the
airline company Charlie Sheen's father works for, tells Charlie : "Zero sum
game. Somebody wins. Somebody loses." I suppose this proves the director,
Oliver Stone, doesn't understand finance either. PG-13
Math *
Film ***
Keith Dennis mentions this sci-fi movie about some famous scientist being
taken out of Russia. He dies, but they take chemicals from his brain and recover
his memory. Early in the movie there a car is rushing to an airport and the
camera pans down to show a book on the seat, presumably to tell us that we have
a physicist in the car. Unfortunately the book is Artin & Tate, Class Field
Theory, the green IAS version. It must have sounded like a physics book to the
prop man. I haven't seen this one. Made for TV
Math ?
Film ?
The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981)
Richard Maso suggests this 6-episode TV series, sometimes shown spliced
together on TV, and available on laserdisc, etc. There are some bits of comedic,
Lewis-Carroll-type math. In particular, the narrator argues that the number of
planets in the universe is infinite, but the number of inhabited planets is
finite. Therefore the fraction of inhabited planets is zero, and the universe
contains no life.Made for TV
Math *
Film ***
Dr. Sidney J. Kolpas points out this Danny Kaye musical comedy with a song
about the Pythagorean Theorem. I haven't seen it yet, but IMDB reviewers give it
high marks. Unrated
Math ?
Film ?
While were on the topic of the Pythagorean Theorem, here is a storyboard
proof:
(I found this in Glimpses of Algebra and Geometry by Gabor Toth
(Springer, 1997) and on the Web
. Anyone know who invented it?)
Bernd Ensing suggests this family movie about a boy who inherits the
Minnesota Twins from his grandfather. He takes his homework to the ballpark,
where the whole team struggles with a problem about two men wanting to paint a
house: It takes the first man three hours to paint a house, the second one needs
five hours. How long will it take both of them working together? Fun movie, but
I found the solution unedifying. PG
Math *
Film ***
Star
Trek : Wolf in the Fold (1967)
Simon Plouffe suggest the scene in this episode from the first TV series
where Spock asks the computer to compute Pi to the last digit.
Stephen Gagola writes concerning It's
My Turn (1980):
"You mentioned that in the movie It's My Turn (1980), except for
all-too-brief glimpse of the proof of the snake lemma of homological algebra,
the rest of the film is math-free. But actually, there are some tid-bits
scattered here and there throughout.
