Mathematics lives inside the loneliest of stories. Most great discoveries happen in a room with no one else present — on paper, inside a silence that can last years. Andrew Wiles worked for seven years without telling anyone. Paul Erdős never owned a home; he dragged a suitcase from colleague to colleague until the day he died. Maryam Mirzakhani filled her notebooks not with equations but with drawings, as though mathematics were a visual language only she could read.

When you watch these people — really watch them — something shifts. You realize that what makes someone fall in love with mathematics is never the formulas. It’s the obsession. The particular madness of chasing a question that doesn’t have to give you anything back. The feeling, when something finally opens up, that is almost impossible to describe to anyone who hasn’t felt it. Richard Feynman called it the pleasure of finding things out. These films are full of that pleasure.

Every documentary on this list shows that other face of mathematics. Some are portraits, some are adventures, some are almost thrillers. But in all of them you sense the same thing: the person on screen isn’t performing. They genuinely cannot stop.

“Open any one of them. The first ten minutes will tell you everything.”

For a classroom, or for a quiet evening alone. If you want to go deeper after watching, there are channels built for exactly that.

A Trip to Infinity

Infinity · Universe

Thinking about infinity is like watching the brain fight itself. Mathematicians, particle physicists, and cosmologists gather here to do exactly that — and they pull the viewer along with them. Can infinities have different sizes? Is the universe genuinely infinite? The answers make the questions larger, not smaller.

The Great Math Mystery

Philosophy · Universe

Is mathematics a human invention or the hidden language of the universe? Very few documentaries take this question seriously enough to sit with it. This one does. It asks why the laws of physics are mathematical at all — and never lets go of the “why,” which means it never lets go of you either.

I Want to Be a Mathematician: Paul Halmos

Portrait · Pedagogy

Paul Halmos was one of the rare mathematicians who understood how mathematics should be written and taught. This 44-minute film contains a rare interview — and it’s candid in ways that academic portraits rarely are. Why someone chooses mathematics, how it feels to live inside it, what makes a proof beautiful. Hard to find a more honest source.

Hunting the Hidden Dimension

Fractal · Geometry

How do you measure a coastline? The closer you look, the longer it gets. Fractal geometry was born from exactly that paradox. This documentary follows Mandelbrot’s strange discovery into mountains, clouds, circulatory systems, and the animation industry. For anyone who wants to see how mathematics hides in the places no one thinks to look — similar to how hyperbolic geometry hides in a crisp.

Between the Folds

Origami · Art

What could paper folding have to do with mathematical proof? Most people who ask that question before watching this film understand the answer by the end of it. Ten artists and theoretical scientists who abandoned conventional careers to fold paper — but really, a film about what happens when you refuse to accept the walls between disciplines.

Secrets of the Surface: Maryam Mirzakhani

Portrait · Role Model

Maryam Mirzakhani didn’t write in her notebooks — she drew. In 2014 she became the first woman and the first Iranian to receive the Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest honour. This film enters her mathematical world while also tracing her path as an immigrant, a woman, and a student. A reminder that sometimes what makes someone love mathematics is simply seeing someone like themselves do it first.

A Brilliant Madness: John Nash

Portrait · Game Theory

At twenty, John Nash wrote a proof. That proof spent decades becoming a foundation of modern economic theory. Meanwhile, Nash spent those same decades in and out of psychiatric hospitals, nearly forgotten, believing he was receiving messages from aliens. He received the Nobel Prize in 1994, as he was just beginning to surface. One of the few films that holds mathematical genius and human fragility in the same frame at the same time.

Taking the Long View: Shiing-Shen Chern

Portrait · Bridges

Shiing-Shen Chern was one of the great geometers of the twentieth century. But this documentary is as much about what he built between people as what he built in mathematics — bridges between China and the West, between pure research and human connection. A man who carried the temperament of a classical Chinese sage and the mind of a modern mathematician in the same body.

The Proof

Fermat · Wiles

Andrew Wiles wept on camera when he announced the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem. This documentary tells the road to that moment: seven years of secret work, an error, a crisis, and finally the solution. One of the most dramatic moments in the history of mathematics, edited almost like a thriller. Just as some mathematical truths arrive to a hostile room, Wiles’s came to a tearful one.

The Code

Patterns · Nature

Marcus du Sautoy spends three episodes asking one question: what is the hidden code governing our world? From the architecture of veins to the geometry of the night sky, he shows that numbers are everywhere — and that this is not a coincidence. Du Sautoy’s narration is among the best in this genre: it carries knowledge without crushing you under it.

La Lettre Scellee du Soldat Doblin

War · Loss

In 1940, as France fell, a French soldier burned his papers and took his own life in a barn. Years later he was identified as Vincent Doblin — an extraordinarily gifted young mathematician. Before he died, he had sealed his work in an envelope. It remained unopened for sixty years. When it was finally read in 2000, it revealed work decades ahead of its time. One of the saddest and strangest stories in the history of mathematics.

Hard Problems: The Road to the IMO

Olympiad · Youth

The world’s hardest mathematics competition. Six American high school students. This documentary follows them through the preparation, the pressure, and the fear of failure. Mathematics experienced as a sport, young minds wrestling with impossible problems — gripping even for those who have never heard of the Mathematical Olympiad.

Chaos: A Mathematical Adventure

Chaos · Dynamics

Why is the butterfly effect a genuine mathematical concept? How does chaos theory produce apparent randomness inside a deterministic universe? This nine-part series by Étienne Ghys and collaborators explains nonlinear dynamics through extraordinary visuals — from Poincaré to the Lorenz attractor. Each chapter stands alone, and each one moves something.

Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem

Portrait · Cold War

Hilbert’s tenth problem was posed in 1900 and remained open for seventy years. Julia Robinson spent decades on it. The solution, when it came, arrived through an unlikely collaboration between an American woman mathematician and a young Soviet colleague — at the height of the Cold War. This documentary is simultaneously the story of a mathematical problem, a friendship, and an era.

The Story of 1

Numbers · History

From scratches on a bone to Roman numerals to the Arabic system we use today — Terry Jones narrates this journey with a style that is somehow both comic and genuinely illuminating. You learn why zero took so long to be invented, why the word “bankrupt” comes from a broken table in Italian courts, and why the number 1 didn’t have to be where everything started.

The Secret Rules of Modern Living: Algorithms

Algorithms · Everyday Life

Marcus du Sautoy traces 2,000-year-old problem-solvers into the present: search engines, navigation, social media rankings — all mathematics. He shows how they work, but more importantly asks where they came from. A film that reminds you mathematics is not abstract. It is inside everything you touch before noon.

M.C. Escher: Journey into Infinity

Art · Geometry

Escher was not a mathematician. But mathematicians have been moved to tears by his work — this is documented. Infinite staircases, interlocking birds and fish, impossible geometries — all produced with intuition and paper. In Robin Lutz’s portrait, Stephen Fry reads Escher’s own words. For anyone who wants to see exactly where mathematics and art find each other.

The Colours of Infinity

Mandelbrot · Fractal

Presented by Arthur C. Clarke, this film enters the world of the Mandelbrot set — objects that could never have been seen without computers, yet generated by a formula of breathtaking simplicity. Infinite complexity from a single equation. The discovery has since spread into science, medicine, weather analysis, and economics. A film about the moment a mathematical object became visible for the first time.

N Is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős

Portrait · Eccentricity

Paul Erdős had no home and no job. He traveled the world with a single suitcase, knocked on doors, and asked: “Is your brain open?” And people let him in — because working with Erdős was what mathematics felt like at its most alive. The most prolific mathematician in history, followed across four years and four countries. Like Roger Penrose’s notebooks, what Erdős left behind reveals not just what he thought, but how his mind actually moved.

25 Beautiful Math Documentaries to Make Students Love Mathematics