Maths at the Cinema!

Alan Turing is played by Benedict Cumberbatch
in  The Imitation Game (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

You know how it is, you wait 10 years for a decent film about maths and then two come along at once.

Showing at the cinema at the moment are Interstellar (a Hollywood big budget sci-fi affair, starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway) and The Imitation Game (a more thoughtful and moving account of Alan Turing's life and work, starring Benedict Cumberbatch).

In Interstellar, the crew of a spaceship search for a wormhole near Saturn in an attempt to find a planet suitable for human habitation, with planet Earth become distinctly unfriendly for humans. Interstellar takes on board some of the more remarkable aspects of relativity and deals with them in a surprising, but mathematically correct, way. Ultimately, humanity is saved by the solving of the "Gravity Problem", and it all boils down to a mathematician solving one equation, so the film loses marks on this somewhat facile point.

The Imitation Game is an excellent dramatisation of Turing's life, but does contain some quite extreme, some might say inexcusable, artistic licence. His character slips too easily into the ready cliché of being work-obsessed and unable to communicate. And the veracity of the story is dubious in places, such as Turing's being in the clutch of a Soviet spy. But if the film's appeal means that more people are made aware of his extraordinary life and work and the beautiful potential of mathematics, then its filming can only be a good thing for mathematics education.