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Math in the Movies TheMath in the Movies PageAGuide to Major Motion Pictures with Scenes ofReal Mathematics"***Totally delightful" ExciteReviewsand Movie Guide"...wortha few visits, and quite a bit of fun"NSDL Scout ReportsHear aninterviewwith Math in the Movies and somegreat sound clips of math scenesfrom National Public Radio.New!LetterstoMath in the Movies andMathematiciansinthe MoviesYour letters on over 80different movies with at least a littlemath content, and a list of movies featuring real mathematicians.Suggest some more!Also,try our new, free, BigNumberCalculator.(It uses the BigInteger class inthe latest versions of Java, soyou'll need Netscape 6 or later, Internet Explorer 5 or later, orOpera. They could have used it in Cube)Lookingfor a gift suggestion? Check out my new book: Switching to a Mac ForDummies. Numb3rs(2005)A CBS TV series starting itsthird year, where David Krumholtzplays Charlie Eppes, a "world class" mathematician who helps hisbrother Don, an FBI agent played by Rob Morrow, solve crimes. Therewere some nice moments, as when a colleague advises him not to wastehis productive years chasing serial criminals, but the math in thepremier was pretty lame, mostly the usual equations-on-a-blackboard,but with some clever visualization of a sprinkler. They did work somereal mathematical thinking into later episodes but Charlie is a bittoo successful predicting the next crime scene from lousy data andway too guilt-ridden when he fails.I've upped my rating based onanother episode, this one aboutsomeone getting ready to announce a proof of the Riemann hypothesiswhen his daughter is kidnapped. Serious math questions were actuallywoven into the plot. Here is a spoiler inrot13: Gur svefg zlfgrel vf gurxvqanccref zbgvir. Gurer vffbzr fcrphyngvba nobhg gur $1 zvyyvba Pynl cevmr, ohg vg jbhyq gnxrgbb ybat gb irg gur cebbs. Gheaf bhg gurl jnag n orggre fvrir sbesnpgbevat vagrtref, boivbhfyl gb oernx EFN rapelcgvba. Gur ivpgvz'fsngure naq gur SOV ntrag'f oebgure jbex ba cebqhpvat gur nytbevguz,ohg ernyvmr gurer vf n ubyr va gur cebbs gurl pna'g cngpu. Gurl pbzrhc jvgu cyna O: thrff jung gnetrg gur xvqanccref ner nvzvat ng naqohvyq n snxr jro fvgr cebgrpgrq ol n xrl gurve cubal cebtenz jvyyoernx.Math ***Series *** ProofLeaving the Wilbur Theater inBoston after seeingtheplay Proof, a theatergoerremarked "This is the year of mathematicians." Proof is now a movie(Directed by Miramax, staring Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins),adapted from David Auburn's Tony and Pulitzer winning play. Three ofthe four main characters are mathematicians. The father character isloosely based on John Nash, but the story is fiction and takes a verydifferent path from A Beautiful Mind, focusing on the daughter.The title is apt. Proof's plotis filed with attempts to provethings: sanity, love, correctness of care decisions, theorems,authorship, adulthood to an older sibling. Even the champaign bottlein the first scene is a mysterious counterexample.In particular, the story asksif proof checking can be an act oflove. Checking is violent work. You must try to demolish someoneelse's creation. But what if you love that person? Is it better totrust condescendingly or to seek the truth and resolve any doubts?Proof's themes are universal,but the emotional life ofmathematicians is dealt with well. Stereotypes are dissected. Themath jokes aren't great but it's fun to hear the two waves oflaughter: from the people who get them immediately and those thathave to wait for the playwright's explanation. Proof's ending ismathematically satisfying. NYU'sCourantInstitute hosted a symposium onProof. PG-13. (There'saseduction scene in the play.)Math ***Play ****Move TBDABeautiful Mind (2001)  thereal John Nash, Russell Crowe & Ron Howard(courtesy ofUniversalPictures).I hated the first half of thismovie. The caricature ofcryptography, right out of"MercuryRising," made me squirm. I wastempted to walk out, but I hadthis review to write, so fortunately I stayed. The second half waswonderful and made complete sense of Act I. All those Hollywood spycliches turn out to be a brilliant device to let us see what happensfrom fromJohnNash's perspective.There is one good math scenewhere Nash and some fellow gradstudents are in a bar and a bevy of young women walk in, lead by avery attractive blonde. Nash realizes that all the guys hitting onthe blonde would not be an optimal strategy and that this datingsituation is a counter example to the claims of classical economictheory. The insight leads to hisNobel-prizewinning result. If true, thiswould be the best eureka yarn sinceNewton and the apple. Otherwise the math was a little weak. Lots ofscrawled equations do not a math movie make. More of an explanationof Nash'swork would have been welcome.A Beautiful Mind is also one ofthe finest love stories everfilmed. After reading how AndrewWiles enjoyedthe full support of his wife while holed up in his attic for sevenyears proving Fermat's Last Theorem, I thought there should a hall offame for great spouses of mathematicians. Mrs. Nash could be anothercharter member. PG-13(One mild bedroom scene, guys on themake, high emotional intensity)Math ***Movie *****Winnerof4Academy Awards (Best Picture,Best Director, Best SupportingActress, Best Adapted Script) with 8 nominations.Fermat'sLast TangoI haven't seen thismusicalplay aboutWiles' proof (featuring songs like "There's a Big Fat Hole in yourProof" and "Math Widow"), but I have the album. The play is availableon VHS video tape and DVD from theClayInstitute and there is a finereview of it in theNoticesof the AMS.CopenhagenQuantum mechanics beatsNewton's as a metaphor for human thought.Our actions are only a projection of the super-positioned thoughtsswirling in our brains. Why did Werner Heisenberg as director of theNazi nuclear program fail to build an atomic bomb? Distaste forHitler? Lack of resources? Incompetence? A complex linear combinationof all three? Will we ever know? Did he?In Copenhagen the ghosts ofHeisenberg, Niels Bohr and Bohr'swife, Margrethe, explore the motives behind their meeting in 1941.Along the way they explain a fair amount of physics, exhibit somegood mathematical thinking and let us experience the deep emotionalbond between teacher and protege.Math ***Play ****It'sMy Turn (1980)In the opening scene of thisromantic comedy, Jill Clayburgh,playing a mathematics professor, proves the "snake lemma" ofhomological algebra: 0 -> A -> B -> C -> 0 | | | 0 -> A'-> B'-> C'-> 0 to an obnoxious graduatestudent. To the best of our knowledge,this is the most erudite mathematical scene in a major motionpicture, though spoiled somewhat by a heavy handed portrayal of thegrad student. The rest of the film is mostlymath-free, unfortunately. RMath ****Film ***StrawDogs (1971)Dustin Hoffman has moved to hiswife's home town in Cornwall,England in the hope of getting some astrophysics done. His boredwife's flirtations lead to serious trouble. Somewhere along the lineshe mischievously changes a plus sign to a minus sign in a set ofgravitational equations on a blackboard. Hoffman's response when hefinally notices is by far the best and most realistic portrayal of amathematician in action in the movies.Caution: The moral of this film is"don't messwith a mathematician," so, as you might expect, a great deal ofviolence occurs. RMath ****Film **** TheU.S. FBI has lobbied forlegislation that would prevent your use of cryptography unless theGovernment can instantly access your unencoded messages. Similarthreats exist in other countries. In the long run, it is impossibleto suppress cryptography without restricting mathematical researchand teaching. OurCipherSaberpagedemonstrates this by showing how little knowledge is required tobuild a strong encryption program.Fight the CryptoBan withCybersaber! We'll tell you how.GoodWill Hunting (1997)Like itsFields-medalistSalieriesqemath professor, this movie begins by putting a hard problem on theblackboard: Can anyone save a defiant, troubled kid fromworking-classSouthBoston who happens to be aRamanujan-levelgenius?But instead of a convincingsolution, we get easy answers. RobinWilliams' soberly played shrink brushes past Hunting's intelligenceto get at his abusive childhood, never contemplating genius as anequal source of pain. The women are either on a pedestal or deserveto be. The movie plinks every soft target that gets in it sights:gullible psychotherapists, corporate recruiters, snotty Harvardstudents, the NSA,evenMITcustodial foremen.The film's best aspect is thelove and care lavished on gettingSouth Boston right. If they had only done as well by themathematicians, depicted here as corporate, arrogant, joyless andcold. The movie shows the outside of MIT, but not the inside.There is so much talent herethat I want to give an Incomplete andmake them turn in a more thoughtful version next semester. Too badserious movies don't get sequels.R (mostlyfor foul language it would seem)Math *Film ***Note: Bert Jagers created aMaple worksheet on the math in GoodWill Hunting:http://www.math.utwente.nl/~jagersaa/Will.html Pi(1998)This a movie about madness, notmathematics. The math, computerscience, theology, and pharmacology are bad. (One faux pas is asuggestion that one could try all possible 216 digit numbers.) Butthey are brilliantly combined with music, and camera work to place usin the tormented mind of a paranoid obsessive seeking the centraltruth of the universe --which is excreted by computers just beforethey melt down -- while he is pursued by Wall Street brokers andHassidic Jews who know he is onto something.Seethe Pi page for morelinks. RMath *Gematria **Film ***Flubber(1997)Robin Williams explainsNewton's Law of Gravitation to a lifedrawing class in this '90s remake of the 1961AbsentMinded Professor, and there is alot of pseudo-science in thebackground -- even the titles are filled with math symbology. But thestory has been whimsyectomized: the long suffering girlfriend,promoted to college president, really suffers, the professor feelsher 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 cuteingR2D2. Weebo deserved an Oscarforbest supporting actress. PGMath **Film ***This space reserved forUnabomber- The Movie"Math didn't make him kill, itjust made him hard to catch."(It seems there was a TVdocudramaUnabomber:The True Story (1996) )Big(1988)Tom Hanks plays a twelve yearold boy whose wish to be big isgranted by a magical arcade game. His ability to find work and evensucceed mocks the adult world. At a dinner party, Hanks helps theyoung son, whom the real adults are ignoring, with his homework. Inthe process he offers a nice explanation of basic algebra.PGMath ***Film *****Standand Deliver (1987)A high school math teacher,played by Edward James Olmos, gets agroup of inner city kids to learn calculus, amazing and threateningthe educational establishment. Some decent calculus teaching is shownin this true story. PGMath ***Film ****ABrief History of Time (1992)Biography of one of ourgreatest living physicsts,StephenHawking, though a bit light onhis work. GMath ***Film ****Sneakers(1992)Freelance spies track down anall powerful code breaking chipdeveloped by a mysteriously funded mathematician named Gunter Janek.In a brief scene, the long-haired, white-suited Janek lectures on thepossibility of finding a faster way to factor numbers, shouting lotsof big math words, but not really explaining anything. Still, thefilm correctly points out that a breakthrough in factoring couldhappen and would be worth a lot to criminals and people who breakcodes.The mathematician Len Adlemanadvised on the making of this move.Clickhere for his story. PG-13Math **Film ***TheMan Without a Face (1993)Mel Gibson plays a formerteacher turned recluse whose face isbadly disfigured. He befriends a troubled boy and helps him preparefor a military school's entrance exam. In one of his lessons, Gibsonshows the boy how to find the center of any circle by constructingthe perpendicular bisectors of two chords. The figure he draws isn'tquite general enough: the chords share a common point and theyneedn't. But that's the least of their troubles as the secret ofGibson's past comes back to haunt their relationship.PG-13Math ***Film ****Antonia'sLine (1995)In this somewhat morbidchronicle of five generations of sturdywomen, we see Antonia's granddaughter Theresa, who grows from a childprodigy to become a mathematician, lecturing on cohomology andreading a monograph on differential geometry in preference to nursingher baby. In a movie filled with stereotypes, we should not expect awoman mathematician to be anything but cold. One nit: Theresa says "Xcomma A" while reading a diagram during her lecture scene but itappears in the subtitles as "X.A". The translators must habituallychange European commas into English decimal points. Dutch. Unrated, Quite a bit of S.ex and ViolenceMath ***Film ****DieHard: With A Vengeance (1995)Bruce Willis and Samuel L.Jackson are given a five gallon jug anda three gallon jug, and must put exactly four gallons of water on ascale to keep a bomb from exploding. RMath ***Film ***TheMirror has Two Faces (1996)Hunk math prof Jeff Bridgesexplains the Twin Prime Conjecture(that there are infinitely many pairs of primes only two numbersapart) 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-13Math ***Film ***Remake ofLeMiroir a Deux Faces (1959)Trivia question: what is therelationship between the Twin PrimeConjecture and the infamous floating point bug in Intel's originalPentium chip?Clickhere to find out.Contact(1997)Jodie Foster is perfect whenshe defines prime numbers for a groupof Washington bigwigs and is greeted by blank stares. But why doesthe movie have to work so hard explaing her devotion to science? Thebook's nonsense about pi is not in the movie. PGMath ***Film ****RealMen Do CountIf we had a dollar for everywar movie made, we could afford a T1Internet connection. Yet almost every soldier flick is predictable:If the movie has a happy ending, the heroes win a few in thebeginning, then start losing until the very end when they win the bigbattle, but the supporting actor is killed. If it's a tragedy, theylose in the beginning, win in the middle, lose the big one and thestar dies. Good military tactics never seem to play anypartin the outcome. We know of only two movies where the heroes evenbother to count how many of the enemy are out there. These moviesare:TheSeven Samurai (1954) (Shichinin no Samurai)Akira Kurosawa's masterfulstory of a 16th century Japanesevillage that defends itself by hiring down-and-out samurai. Thewisest teaches his comrades in arms to plan. Japanese. Norating. Fairly violent.Math ***Film *****Kelly'sHeroes (1970)Clint Eastwood leads an allstar cast in search of Nazi gold. Butfirst they have to take out the German tanks one at a time. How dothey know when they're all gone? They counted them first, silly.PGMath **Film ****Computersin the MoviesThe Charles Babbage Instituteat the University of Minnesota beatme to this one. They have a list,"Hollywoodand Computers", of 42movies withcomputers 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 ascientific computer looked like in thegood old days, see Stanley Kubrick's classic satire on nucleardoomsday with its fine scenes of an IBM7094/1401installation. Peter Sellers almost saves the world with a transistorradio hidden in a 1403 printer.Unrated.OK, I think, forolder teensComputer ***Film *****Moviesin MathematicsHere is a paperhttp://www.siam.org/siamnews/11-01/networks.pdfthat discusses the properties of the Kevin Bacon Graph (KBG), whosenodes are actors in major motion pictures (as listed at imdb.com) andwhere each node is connected by an edge iff the two actors appearedtogether in a film. Interestingly, its largest connected componentcontains 90% of all actors.Help support this page bybuying one of these great gift ideas:Switching to a Mac For Dummies,"Banging your head against awall--it feels so good when you stop"ServiceOriented Architecture for Dummies"If you're in IT, better knowSOA."TheInternet for Dummies Quick Reference,8th Edition,"Everything youneed in a small, lay-flat package."Both are co-authored by me and published by IDG Books.You can find these books at your favorite bookstore, or on-line inassociation with Amazon.com.FindOut How to Fight the Crypto Ban!More Movies Suggested by OurReadersA Hill on theDark Sideof the Moon (1983)( Berget paa maanens baksida(1983))Roger Cooke asks "how in theworld did you overlook [this] storyofSonyaKovalevskaya's stay inSweden--advertised as thefeministmovie of the 1980's. Actually, as a female colleague said to me afterseeing it, 'That movie says that to be a female mathematician youhave to be ugly, neurotic, and a bad mother.' Since I have spentconsiderable time researching and writing about Kovalevskaya, Iconcur. Mathematically they missed the point entirely aboutKovalevskaya. On the plus side, where else would you see actorsportraying Weierstrass and Mittag-Leffler?""On the personal side, theyalso got it wrong. I remember thinkingMeg Ryan was hardly the ideal actress to play Einstein's brilliantniece in IQ,but she'd have been about rightphysically (with her hair dyed brown) to play Kovalevskaya. Insteadthey got an extremely homely Swedish actress to play the part, andthey made her a temperamental prima donna at her first lecture inStockholm. Actually, she was diffident to the extreme, and alwaysafraid she wasn't doing a good enough job. As for my colleague'scomments, well, Kovalevskaya wasneurotic and a bad mother,but she wasn't ugly. A century after her death, though, she stillleaves a legacy of two very brilliant mathematical results." Searchgoogle.comwith the key word "Kovalevskaya" for more resources about her." P.S. There is a mountain onthe far side of the moon that theSoviets named after Kovalevskaya (their robot space ship[Luna3] was the first to photographthe far side of the moon). Ipresume that's the reason for the title, though no reference is madeto it in the movie, either at the beginning or the end."Sweden7 (~PG)Math ?Film ?I.Q.(1994)Walter Matthau asAlbertEinstein plays matchmaker forhis niece played by Meg Ryan. JudyAnn Brown's favorite scene is where Meg Ryan attempts to explain toTim Robbins why she can't dance with him: she can only walk half thedistance between them and then half again and half again and she willnever reach him. Rhiju Das was impressed when Meg Ryan's characterputs the Schrodinger equation on the board, in operatorform.PGMath **Film ***Cube(1997)This dark, nihilistic film hasgenerated the mostlettersto Math inthe Movies. A group of peopleare trapped in a nightmare latticeof cubic rooms and have to figure out how to escape. Cartesiancoordinates and prime numbers play a key role. The moral: factor ordie! The most interesting math here is in thinking about how theymade the movie. R brutalviolence, languageMath **Film **Deathof a Neapolitan Mathematician (Morte di un Matematico Napoletano)(1992)Laura Parigi, from Florence,Italy and Dan Schnabel suggest thisItalian movie, written and directed by Mario Martone. It's the storyof an important Italian mathematician looking at the last week of hislife before he kills himself in 1959. I haven't seen it yet.UnratedMath ?Film ?Infinity(1996)Jon Reeves says you mustsee, this biopic aboutRichardFeynman. There's a pricelessscene where he has a calculatingduel with a guy with an abacus. Feynman, using pencil and paper, addsa bit slower, but multiplies slightly faster, and really whips him inthe cube root competition. Afterward, he explains it all to hisfiancee. PGMath ?Film ?Subject *****LittleMan Tate (1991)A bright 8-year-old is placedin a program for gifted children.Edie Bennett liked the scene where a teacher has several odd and evennumbers on the board and asks how many of them are divisible by 2.Tate raises his hand and answers "All of them." PGMath **Film ****WallStreet (1987)Tel Lekatsas points out thatfinancier Michael Douglas, afterbuying the airline company Charlie Sheen's father works for, tellsCharlie : "Zero sum game. Somebody wins. Somebody loses." I supposethis proves the director, Oliver Stone, doesn't understand financeeither. PG-13Math *Film ***Hauser'sMemory (1970)Keith Dennis mentions thissci-fi movie about some famousscientist being taken out of Russia. He dies, but they take chemicalsfrom his brain and recover his memory. Early in the movie there a caris rushing to an airport and the camera pans down to show a book onthe seat, presumably to tell us that we have a physicist in the car.Unfortunately the book is Artin & Tate, Class Field Theory, thegreen IAS version. It must have sounded like a physics book to theprop man. I haven't seen this one. Madefor TVMath ?Film ?TheHitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981)Richard Maso suggests this6-episode TV series, sometimes shownspliced together on TV, and available on laserdisc, etc. There aresome bits of comedic, Lewis-Carroll-type math. In particular, thenarrator argues that the number of planets in the universe isinfinite, but the number of inhabited planets is finite. Thereforethe fraction of inhabited planets is zero, and the universe containsno life.Made for TVMath *Film ***MerryAndrew (1958)Dr. Sidney J. Kolpas points outthis Danny Kaye musical comedywith a song about the Pythagorean Theorem. I haven't seen it yet, butIMDB reviewers give it high marks. UnratedMath ?Film ?While were on the topic of thePythagorean Theorem, here is astoryboard proof: (I found this in Glimpsesof Algebra and Geometry by GaborToth (Springer, 1997) and on theWeb.Anyone know who invented it?)LittleBig League (1994)Bernd Ensing suggests thisfamily movie about a boy who inheritsthe Minnesota Twins from his grandfather. He takes his homework tothe ballpark, where the whole team struggles with a problem about twomen wanting to paint a house: It takes the first man three hours topaint a house, the second one needs five hours. How long will it takeboth of them working together? Fun movie, but I found the solutionunedifying. PGMath *Film ***StarTrek : Wolf in the Fold (1967)Simon Plouffe suggest the scenein this episode from the first TVseries where Spock asks the computer to compute Pi to the last digit.StephenGagola writes concerningIt's MyTurn (1980):"You mentioned that in themovie It's My Turn (1980), except forall-too-brief glimpse of the proof of the snake lemma of homologicalalgebra, the rest of the film is math-free. But actually, there aresome tid-bits scattered here and there throughout. Jill has an exchange with aprecocious boy, probably junior high school age, about prime numbers.This was a big disappointment for me: mathematically precocious kidsthis age are a lot smarter than was represented in the exchange. At one point, someUniversity administrator, probably a Dean, mentions to Jill Clayburghthat 'Group theory is a really hard area to work in'. I wish our ownadministrators would believe that. Jill's father, at one point,introduces his daughter as a mathematician who is working in finitesimple groups. How many group theorists have parents who know what theydo? Also, I heard as an anecdote, that this scene had to be edited. Thefather had first introduced his daughter as someone working in the areaof finite, simple, ABELIAN groups. A mathematician (or someoneknowledgeable about the subject) present during the screening broke outin laughter on hearing this. Jill, at one point workingon the back of an envelope, is frustrated that she `can't quite getthis 2-fusion problem to work out'. The movie ends on an up-beatnote, mathematically, when the obnoxious grad student and Jill share(in a rather cryptic exchange) some clever insight that would lead tothe solution of the classification problem. Interestingly enough, 1980(the year of the movie) is the more-or-less agreed date that the finitesimple groups were classified." Other ... in The Movies pagesOliverKnill'scollection of movie clips inwhich mathematics appear.Mike Shor'sGameTheory.nethas a nicesection on Game Theory in the Movies.TheMathematical Fiction Homepageincludes over 400 works ofmathematical fiction (none, apparently from refereed journals).MorseGoesto The Movies movies with Morsecode scenes (..- -.-. ---.--. -.-- ..--..)Hollywoodand Computers from the CharlesBabbage Institute at theUniversity of Minnesota.Cybercinemasponsored by the Department of English at the University of Illinoisat Urbana-Champaign.The Mathematical SciencesResearch Institute in Berkeley,California held amathfilmfestival in October 2002.Juggling inMoviesHollywood Mathand ScienceFilm ConsultingOther Math humorAlist of some common proof techniques.MASSIVEMath AndScience Song Information, Viewable EverywhereMovie information linksprovided courtesy of theInternetMovie Database,a truly cool site.MotionPicture Association ofAmerica ratings are shown whereavailable. Other comments onsuitability for children minds are the author's personal opinions.Concerned parents should seek additional points of view andpre-screen movies if possible.Comments and additionalreferences to movies where mathematics ormathematicians are accurately portrayed are welcome. Mumbo-jumbo,pseudo-math and mad scientist cliches (e.g.JurassicPark,IndependenceDay) are not what we are lookingfor. Please send e-mail with asmuch specific information as possible to: reinhold@world.std.com We'll consider your letters fora future update toLettersto Math inthe Movies.We wrote a set of mathactivites based on Math in the Moviesthemes forPublicBroadcasting's PBS TeacherSource.Check it out.Created and maintained by ArnoldG. ReinholdThanks also to: AsariHirotsugu, Jay Sulzberger, Jeff Erickson,Naoki Sato, Jose Maria Vinna Rebelledo, Jon Bell, Matt Holzman, TomZaslavsky and many, many others. 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