The Best Math Movies: Lives Written on the Board
Mathematics & Cinema
Abakcus · Cinema
The proof of a theorem is the thing the camera does not love. It is silent, motionless, it happens in a room. A good while passed before cinema learned how to film it.
For a long time cinema kept a strange relationship with mathematics. What the camera loved was motion. A chase, an explosion, a glance. Yet the proof of a theorem most often happens in a room, at the head of a sheet of paper, in hours no one sees. Inside, something tremendous turns, but someone looking from outside sees only a bent back and a hand that keeps scribbling. For years directors could not find how to film this silence. So they got out of it by showing the mathematician as either a man cut off from the world, or a prodigy child, or a set piece scrawling incomprehensible symbols on a board.
Then, slowly, something changed. Films realized that the real tension of mathematics is hidden not in the result but on the road to the solution. What was interesting was not whether an equation came out right, but what the person solving it became in the meantime. A good mathematics film is one that tells not of numbers themselves but of the loneliness, the arrogance, the obsession, and sometimes the salvation of someone wrestling with numbers. The symbols on the board stay there, but the camera turns mainly toward the eyes looking at those symbols.
The twenty-three films below are made up of works that have captured this transformation from different angles. Not all of them are masterpieces. Some use mathematics only as an ornament, others place it at the very heart of the story. But each one has understood at least one thing about mathematics correctly. I have put the list together not in order of viewing but so that the people they portray complete one another. By the time you reach the end, you will have an idea less about mathematics than about the mathematician. If you would rather watch the real thing, our companion guides to beautiful math documentaries and math movies based on true stories chase the same obsession from other directions.
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01
A Beautiful Mind
2001
Director Ron Howard
02
Good Will Hunting
1997
Director Gus Van Sant
03
Stand and Deliver
1988
Director Ramón Menéndez
04
Rain Man
1988
Director Barry Levinson
05
Pi
1998
Director Darren Aronofsky
06
Proof
2005
Director John Madden
07
Moneyball
2011
Director Bennett Miller
What is striking is that almost none of these films try to explain mathematics. They all use mathematics as a pretext and speak of the human being. The symbols on the board are always the guise of something else, of loneliness, stubbornness, fear, or faith.
08
Travelling Salesman
2012
Director Timothy Lanzone
09
Gifted
2017
Director Marc Webb
10
The Bank
2001
Director Robert Connolly
11
Cube
1997
Director Vincenzo Natali
12
Fermat's Room
2007
Director Luna & Sopeña
13
The Oxford Murders
2008
Director Álex de la Iglesia
14
Sneakers
1992
Director Phil Alden Robinson
15
Contact
1997
Director Robert Zemeckis
16
Mean Girls
2004
Director Mark Waters
17
Little Man Tate
1991
Director Jodie Foster
18
Breaking the Code
1996
Director Herbert Wise
19
Antonia's Line
1995
Director Marleen Gorris
20
Agora
2009
Director Alejandro Amenábar
21
21
2008
Director Robert Luketic
22
The Imitation Game
2014
Director Morten Tyldum
23
Hidden Figures
2016
Director Theodore Melfi
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