This is a list of feature films and documentaries that include mathematicians, scientists who use math or references to mathematicians.
Films where mathematics is central to the plot:
Biographical films based on real-life mathematicians:
Films where one or more of the main characters are mathematicians, but that are not otherwise about mathematics:
Films where one or more of the members of the main cast is a mathematician:
A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change.
Srinivasa Ramanujan was an Indian mathematician. Though he had almost no formal training in pure mathematics, he made substantial contributions to mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions, including solutions to mathematical problems then considered unsolvable.
Godfrey Harold Hardy was an English mathematician, known for his achievements in number theory and mathematical analysis. In biology, he is known for the Hardy–Weinberg principle, a basic principle of population genetics.
Sofya Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya, born Korvin-Krukovskaya, was a Russian mathematician who made noteworthy contributions to analysis, partial differential equations and mechanics. She was a pioneer for women in mathematics around the world – the first woman to obtain a doctorate in mathematics, the first woman appointed to a full professorship in northern Europe and one of the first women to work for a scientific journal as an editor. According to historian of science Ann Hibner Koblitz, Kovalevskaya was "the greatest known woman scientist before the twentieth century".
Paul Erdős was a Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. Erdős pursued and proposed problems in discrete mathematics, graph theory, number theory, mathematical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. Much of his work centered around discrete mathematics, cracking many previously unsolved problems in the field. He championed and contributed to Ramsey theory, which studies the conditions in which order necessarily appears. Overall, his work leaned towards solving previously open problems, rather than developing or exploring new areas of mathematics.
Numbers is an American crime drama television series that was broadcast on CBS from January 23, 2005, to March 12, 2010, for six seasons and 118 episodes. The series was created by Nicolas Falacci and Cheryl Heuton, and follows FBI Special Agent Don Eppes and his brother Charlie Eppes, a college mathematics professor and prodigy, who helps Don solve crimes for the FBI. Brothers Ridley and Tony Scott produced Numbers; its production companies are the Scott brothers' Scott Free Productions and CBS Television Studios.
Charles Edward Eppes, Ph.D., is a fictional character and one of the protagonists of the CBS crime drama Numb3rs. He is portrayed by David Krumholtz.
Akshay Venkatesh is an Australian mathematician and a professor at the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. His research interests are in the fields of counting, equidistribution problems in automorphic forms and number theory, in particular representation theory, locally symmetric spaces, ergodic theory, and algebraic topology.
Ken Ono is an American mathematician who specializes in number theory, especially in integer partitions, modular forms, umbral moonshine, the Riemann Hypothesis and the fields of interest to Srinivasa Ramanujan. He is the STEM Advisor to the Provost and the Marvin Rosenblum Professor of Mathematics at the University of Virginia.
Sofya Kovalevskaya is a 1985 biographical television miniseries, directed by Ayan Shakhmaliyeva and starring Elena Safonova.
The Story of Maths is a four-part British television series outlining aspects of the history of mathematics. It was a co-production between the Open University and the BBC and aired in October 2008 on BBC Four. The material was written and presented by University of Oxford professor Marcus du Sautoy. The consultants were the Open University academics Robin Wilson, professor Jeremy Gray and June Barrow-Green. Kim Duke is credited as series producer.
Fermat's Last Theorem is a popular science book (1997) by Simon Singh. It tells the story of the search for a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, first conjectured by Pierre de Fermat in 1637, and explores how many mathematicians such as Évariste Galois had tried and failed to provide a proof for the theorem. Despite the efforts of many mathematicians, the proof would remain incomplete until 1995, with the publication of Andrew Wiles' proof of the Theorem. The book is the first mathematics book to become a Number One seller in the United Kingdom, whilst Singh's documentary The Proof, on which the book was based, won a BAFTA in 1997.
YitangZhang is a Chinese-American mathematician primarily working on number theory and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 2015.
Ramanujan is a 2014 biographical film based on the life of Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. The film, written and directed by Gnana Rajasekaran, was shot back to back in the Tamil and English languages. The film was produced by the independent Indian production house Camphor Cinema, ventured by Srivatsan Nadathur, Sushant Desai, Sharanyan Nadathur, Sindhu Rajasekaran. The cast consists of Indian and British film, stage and screen personalities. It marks the Tamil debut of Abhinay Vaddi, the grandson of veteran Tamil film actors Gemini Ganesan and Savitri, as the protagonist.
James Alexander Maynard is an English mathematician working in analytic number theory and in particular the theory of prime numbers. In 2017, he was appointed Research Professor at Oxford. Maynard is a fellow of St John's College, Oxford. He was awarded the Fields Medal in 2022 and the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize in 2023.
The Man Who Knew Infinity is a 2015 British biographical drama film about the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, based on the 1991 book of the same name by Robert Kanigel.
X+Y, released in the US as A Brilliant Young Mind, is a 2014 British drama film directed by Morgan Matthews and starring Asa Butterfield, Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins.
Neena Gupta is a professor at the Statistics and Mathematics Unit of the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Kolkata. Her primary fields of interest are commutative algebra and affine algebraic geometry.
Lisa Marie Piccirillo is an American mathematician who works on Geometry and low-dimensional topology. In 2020, Piccirillo published a mathematical proof in the journal Annals of Mathematics determining that the Conway knot is not a slice knot, answering an unsolved problem in knot theory first proposed over fifty years prior by English mathematician John Horton Conway. In July 2020, she became an assistant professor of mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
George Paul Csicsery is a Hungarian-American writer and independent filmmaker who has directed 35 films including performance films, dramatic shorts and documentaries. He is best known for his documentaries about mathematicians and mathematical communities.
Brown's screenplay brings math into the dialogue often and without embarrassment.
