List of films about mathematicians

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is a list of feature films that include a mathematician (or scientist who uses a lot of math) as one of the main characters.

• To Sir, with Love (1967) - Engineer Mark Thackeray (Sidney Poitier) becomes a teacher.
• Straw Dogs (1971) - David Sumner (Dustin Hoffman) is an American mathematical physicist who moves to England, where he and his wife are violently harassed by locals.
• It's My Turn (1980) - A mathematics professor (Jill Clayburgh) falls in love with her father's bride's son (Michael Douglas).
• Stand and Deliver (1988) - Based on the true story of math teacher Jaime Escalante, who inspired the students in a school in a Hispanic neighborhood.
• Sneakers (1992) - An eclectic team is assembled to steal a code-breaking box developed by a rogue mathematician.
• Jurassic Park (1993) - A mathematician (Jeff Goldblum) is among those invited to a theme park with cloned dinosaurs, in order to assess its safety.
• I.Q. (1994) - Albert Einstein (Walter Matthau) helps a young man (Tim Robbins) pretend to be a physicist in order to catch the attention of Einstein's niece (Meg Ryan).
• Antonia's Line (1995) - A genealogical "line" of five generations of women includes a child prodigy, Thérèse, who grows up to be a mathematician.
• Infinity (1996) - A story about Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman (Matthew Broderick).
• The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996) - A math professor (Jeff Bridges) marries a literature professor (Barbra Streisand), but they want different things from the relationship.
• Good Will Hunting (1997) - Janitor Will Hunting (Matt Damon) begins to turn his life around with the help of a psychologist (Robin Williams) and a Fields Medal-winning professor (Stellan Skarsgård).
• The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) - Mathematician Ian Malcom (Jeff Goldblum) travels to an auxiliary Jurassic Park site to document dinosuars.
• Pi (1998) - A mathematician searches for the number that underlies all of nature.
• A Beautiful Mind (2001) - A fictional account based loosely on the life of mathematician John Nash (Russell Crowe), who made a breakthrough that wins him the Nobel Prize in economics.
• Enigma (2001) - A story of romantic and psychological intrigue set in Bletchley Park during the World War II effort to crack the German Enigma machine.
• 21 Grams (2003) - An accident changes many lives, including that of a critically ill mathematics professor (Sean Penn).
• Proof (2005) - A former student (Jake Gyllenhaal) of a recently deceased, brilliant mathematician (Anthony Hopkins) finds a notebook in his office containing a proof of an important theorem, but the mathematician's daughter (Gwyneth Paltrow) claims it is hers. The ensuing dispute is complicated by signs that she may have inherited her father's mental illness and a burgeoning romance.
• Raising Genius (2004) - The film is about a boy (Justin Long) who locks himself in the bathroom to work out math equations on the shower wall.