Movies that represent Math in some way are my guilty pleasure. I don’t precisely know why I hoard them, but what I do know is that over the years, they have helped humanize the subject for me. We fear Math, we all do. And we do it mainly because we cannot connect to it. So here are 5 movies that all Math lovers will enjoy, and that have personally helped me connect with Math. They won’t magically change your dread for the subject into love, but they sure will inspire you to at least attempt that transition.
5. Stand and Deliver (1988)
Math is the great equalizer.
Fans of Freedom Writers will find a similar theme in this movie. You can say that if Hollywood was a univer
sity, Freedom Writers would be the English Department and Stand and Deliver would be the Math Department. The movie is based on the true story of high school teacher Jaime Escalante and his students from working-class Latino families. It is heavy in its socio-political context; the students are smart, but nobody around them recognizes that. Nobody believes in them, or puts in enough effort. That is until Escalante comes along and vows to make a bunch of kids who can hardly carry out simple calculations pass AP Calculus by the end of their senior year. It is Escalante’s personal struggle as much as it is the students’, with constant cynicism from other teachers and the Educational Testing Service questioning the authenticity of their test scores.
This is the kind of movie that makes you believe in yourself. Escalante’s witty remarks and dry humour strikes a chord somewhere in your heart, convincing you that if a class of illiterate hooligans could master advanced calculus, maybe you can too.
4. X+Y (2014)
“If beauty is truth, and truth is beauty, then surely mathematics is the most beautiful thing of all?”
This is a movie untouched by Hollywood glamour. It is quiet, shy and simple, just like its protagonist, with an authentic British feel to it. Asa Butterfield does a tremendous job of playing Nathan Ellis, a teenage Math prodigy with ASC who is selected for the IMO training camp in Taiwan. This is not a film about autism, so keep your debates at bay. Instead, use it as a peek into the minds of gifted children and the way they see the world. Nathan doesn’t want to be a renowned mathematician, or even win the IMO. He just wants to live, and understand the world around him through the only language he knows. It is like deriving a mathematical expression from perception, like we process what we see in our own native language.
Like Maximilian Cohen says in the 1998 movie Pi, “everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers“. And if there’s anything that comes the closest to relating the alien concept of Math with the everyday world around us, it is X+Y.
3. Gifted (2017)
He’s a good person. He wanted me before I was smart.
This is a recent release starring Chris Evans, with a marvelous performance by the tiny Mckenna Grace. A single man raises his gifted niece after his sister commits suicide and struggles to give her a normal life. He fights for Mary’s custody against his mother, who wants to realize her dead daughter’s unfinished work through her granddaughter. The movie is as much about Mary’s mother Diane as it is about Mary, even though Diane never makes an actual appearance. A promising mathematician, Diane had been forced by her dictator mother to dedicate her whole life trying to prove the Navier-Stokes Millennium problem, which ultimately drove her crazy to the point of killing herself. It appears Mary is headed towards a similar fate, unless her uncle figures out a way to save the day.
Like X+Y, this movie is about a child merely wanting to be, to laugh and play and understand her world. And with a stellar background score, tear-jerker moments, and major daddy vibes from Evans, it becomes a must watch for everyone.
2. Hidden Figures (2017)
Here at NASA we all pee the same color.
I finally got around to watching this movie only last night. One of the best decisions of my life. I don’t even have to say much about Hidden Figures, it has gathered loads of much-deserved Oscar buzz in the last couple of months. But anyway, this is the true story of three African-American women at NASA during the 1960s who created history. From ending segregation within the NASA campus, controlling the first IBM machine, being the first female Afro-American engineer, to sending John Glenn to space, they’ve done it all. Math is like the foundation of a building. You never see it, but without it, that rocket would have never gone into space, or have even safely returned. Without Katherine Goble’s analytic geometry and perfect accuracy, NASA would’ve remained forever defeated by Russia.
As Stanford professor Keith Devlin says, a normal person will look up at a plane and just see it flying in the air, but a mathematician will be able to see the invisible lines holding it up. We can say that Math is a secret language, a rare form of magic that allows its scholars to see things regular people can’t.
1. The Imitation Game (2015)
Do you know, this morning I was on a train that went through a city that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for you.
No other film deserves the No.1 spot more than this one. It is a biopic on Alan Turing and how his team saved the world from Hitler during World War 2 by cracking the German code machine Enigma. What really hits me hard is the fact that this whole thing was kept a government secret for 50 years. Moreover, a global hero was tortured and driven to suicide for being a homosexual. After successfully cracking the Enigma, Turing proposed that the British not intercept every single attack, lest the Germans grew suspicious. He explained instead how Statistics could be used to determine exactly how many attacks to stop and how many to ignore to avoid suspicion. He analysed human psychology through Math, proving once again that patterns exist in all forms of nature. Dozens of towns, thousands of people, exist today, because of Math. It was possible to end the worst crime in global history, because of Math.
Math is the root of all existence. Without it, what are we, really?
Image Sources: IMP Awards, The Hollywood Reporter
