Abstract

There are at least four ways in which cinema engages with mathematics: by representing (some aspects of) the life of a real mathematician; by representing (some aspects of) the life of a fictional mathematician; by offering some features of a person, among which their abilities for mathematics would stand out; or by showing how a character uses mathematics as we all use it in our daily lives without further pretensions. In this chapter, we deal with the first way by focusing on a selection of movies that have represented the life of Srinivasa Ramanujan Aiyangar (1887–1920), Alan Mathison Turing (1912–1954), Stanisław Marcin Ulam (1909–1984), John Forbes Nash Jr. (1928–2015), and the case of three of the African American female mathematicians who served in NASA as the brilliant minds behind the scenes and paved the way for the US space program: Dorothy Vaughan (1910–2008), Katherine Johnson (1918–2020), and Mary Jackson (1921–2005). We analyze and interpret the way in which cinematographic fiction recontextualizes the lives of these scientists and their mathematical thinking, and we offer an appreciation of the cultural connections between cinema and mathematics. But we begin by making a brief assessment of the meaning of mathematics and the importance of its applications in relation to these mathematicians and, at the end of the chapter, we draw some conclusions.