Leonhard Euler
A Beautiful Mind is a biographical movie about the life of the famous Nobel Prize Winner mathematician John Forbes Nash. The duration of the movie is 2 hours and 15 minutes and Nash is played by Russel Crowe.
Old Reviews
Moneyball is a sports movie that revolves around the American baseball team Oakland Athletics and their historical baseball run in the 2002 season. This movie is particularly related to Mathematics from a point of Statistics and specifically Data Analysis. In the movie, the general manager Billy Beane and the assistant general manager Peter Brand are played by Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill respectively.
For this month’s issue of the Math Chronicles, the movie we have chosen is "Good Will Hunting", which is a 1997 film written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, and directed by Gus Van Sant. The film is about a 21-year-old self-taught math prodigy from South Boston, who has just been released from prison. He works as a janitor at MIT. He struggles to comprehend his own troubled past and to find where he fits in the world. He spends the majority of his time drinking with Morgan, Chuckie, and Billy.
This week we will focus on a movie “X+Y” about a teen math prodigy whose only failure is to not build close relationships with people. Nathan is a teenager around 16-17 years old who maintains a normal high school life just like his peers. His only difference from them is his “superpower,” as his father used to call it. That is in fact his extraordinary skills in math.
Although there are several scenes of flashbacks which take the audience into Nathan’s past and serve to illustrate why he is the way he is, the movie usually takes place in the timeline where Nathan is around 16-17 and in an intense study for the upcoming International Mathematical Olympiad, a prestigious high school competition consisting of the world's best young mathematicians (Wikipedia).
MC Movie Review:21
Güney Baver Gürbüz
The movie that we have chosen for the review of The Math Chronicles is inspired by the true story of the MIT Blackjack Team as told in Bringing Down the House, the best-selling 2003 book by Ben Mezrich. The film 21 tells the story of MIT students who "count cards" in order to increase their chances of winning in the casino card game Blackjack. This film has a lot of math in it, which is unsurprising. The "counting of the cards," which is based on Edward O. Thorpe's 1962 book Beat the Dealer, is the actual inspiration of this movie.
Propositional Logic by Ali Nesin
Kaan Asker
Hello, this week we will talk about Ali Nesin’s book, Propositional Logic (Önermeler Mantığı). This book is his first book in his Introduction to Mathematics series. In the book, there is a wide range of topics, from pure logic to mathematical induction. In this review, a brief summary of the sections of the book will be given, and the book will be evaluated.
Counting From Infinity: A Type of Review
Eda Orakçı
For this month’s edition of the Math Chronicles, I wanted to focus on a documentary. This format may prove to be a change of pace, as the film focuses on the daily life of a mathematician who was unheard of until recently, and may still be unheard of today outside of mathematical circles. Complete with interviews from journalists, mathematicians and family friends, the documentary paints the picture of a man who has made a breakthrough contribution to Number Theory. His life, his marriage, his emigration from China and the subsequent challenges he has faced in academia. His irregular job at Subway and his barely noticeable presence in the international mathematical community. His breathtaking paper submitted to Annals of Mathematics sending shockwaves in prestigious academia and taking the lid off of mathematical discovery as it relates to prime numbers.
Hüseyin Şahin
This, in our movie review, we wanted to talk about a movie that reflects the life of one of the most influential mathematicians who is deemed the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. Heard about Turing test? Today, our movie review features The Imitation Game, an excellent movie that best reflects Alan Turing’s part in cracking enigma.
Güney Baver Gürbüz
Do you know who was the first female mathematician in recorded history?
If you have no idea, don’t worry. The movie review of the Math Chronicles for this week will certainly give you some clue. Directed by Alejandro Amenábar and written by Amenábar and Mateo Gil, Agora, a 2009 Spanish English-language historical drama film stars Rachel Weisz as Hypatia of Alexandria, a mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer in late 4th-century Roman Egypt, who investigates the flaws of the geocentric Ptolemaic system and the heliocentric model that challenges it in addition to important inventions.
Kaan Asker
Unlike the previous reviews, this week we have chosen a fiction film, Pi - a 1998 psychological thriller film written and directed by Darren Aronofsky. Filmed on a high-contrast black-and-white reversal, the film earned the Directing Award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay, and the Gotham Open Palm Award.
The film Pi not only analyzes the relevance of mathematics to our complex world but also emphasizes the relationship between mathematics and madness. In the film, there is a constant conflict between numerology and proper number theory.
The Man Who Knew Infinity Review
Eda Orakçı
The first ever film we have chosen to review for the Math Chronicles details the life of one of the most original and productive mathematicians of the Twentieth Century despite receiving no formal training in pure mathematics and only living for 32 years. That’s right - he is the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920), who made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions in a way that is still studied by academics and aspiring mathematicians today. As recently as 2011, his “lost notebook” which detailed his work in the last year of his life, inspired calculations for the entropy of black holes. The film in question is The Man Who Knew Infinity, a 2015 movie by director Matt Brown based on Robert Kanigel’s book by the same name.
