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Review: Hidden Figures

By Katie Steckles. Posted March 8, 2017

Mega-late to the party, I’ve now arrived back from a week lecturing in Indonesia and have found time to go and see the incredibly well-received and widely talked-about NASA women maths film, Hidden Figures. I’ve heard an incredible number of wildly positive responses to the film, from as long ago as January, and have been looking forward to it greatly.

The film is a painstaking and at times brutally realistic depiction of the struggles faced by African-Americans, and by women, during the era of the early space missions.

Not mentioned on The Aperiodical this month, May 2016

By Katie Steckles and Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted May 23, 2016

Here are a few of the stories that we didn’t get round to covering in depth this month.

Turing’s Sunflowers Project – results

Manchester Science Festival’s mass-participation maths/gardening project, Turing’s Sunflowers, ran in 2012 and invited members of the public to grow their own sunflowers, and then photograph or bring in the seed heads so a group of mathematicians could study them. The aim was to determine whether Fibonacci numbers occur in the seed spirals – this has previously been observed, but no large-scale study like this has ever been undertaken. This carries on the work Alan Turing did before he died.

The results of the research are now published – a paper has been published in the Royal Society’s Open Science journal, and the findings indicate that while Fibonacci numbers do often occur, other types of numbers also crop up, including Lucas numbers and other similarly defined number sequences.

The Man Who Knew Infinity trailer

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted March 2, 2016

Here’s an official trailer for the long-awaited Ramanujan biopic, The Man Who Knew Infinity, starring Dev Patel and Jeremy Irons.

Looks good! IMDB reckons it’ll be out on the 8th of April. It’s taken long enough – we first reported on this film just over two years ago.

Bread & Kisses

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted March 24, 2015



Bread & Kisses is a short film by Katherine Fitzgerald about a mathematician who discovers love – I know, I know, you’ve heard this one before – but it also contains a mathematician who moves to the Alps to get more skiing in, so it’s the most realistic film about mathematicians ever. It also features the emotion of love in a star turn as an epsilon term.

Although it contains the line, “you forgot the most important ingredient: love”, so don’t get your hopes too high.

Counting From Infinity – A film about Yitang Zhang

By Katie Steckles. Posted January 27, 2015

Following 2013’s amazing bounded gaps between primes result, mathematician Yitang Zhang has gone from an unknown maths lecturer to a mathematical celebrity. The Mathematical Research Sciences Institute at Berkeley has put together a film telling the story of Zhang’s proof, and his life before and after the announcement.

The film, which was funded by the Simons Foundation, has contributions from a large number of mathematicians, including Daniel Goldston, Kannan Soundararajan, Andrew Granville, Peter Sarnak, Enrico Bombieri, James Maynard (based at Oxford, who did further work to reduce the prime gap following on from Zhang’s), Nicholas Katz, David Eisenbud, Ken Ribet, and Aperiodihero Terry Tao, as well as Zhang himself.

Review: “The Theory of Everything”

By Calvin Smith. Posted January 24, 2015

A few days ago, friend of The Aperiodical James Grime contacted me asking if I would be able to review The Theory of Everything. Obviously I was flattered. In a past life I did some mathematics/physics in the same ballpark as Hawking’s celebrated black-hole work so guessed James was asking because he knew I used to know something about this. Or perhaps it was because he knew that Hawking ran over my foot in a bar at the 17^th International General Relativity and Gravitation conference in Dublin back in 2004? Either way, James had given me a pass to go and watch the beautiful Eddie Redmayne for the evening!

There’s going to be a film about Ramanujan

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted December 16, 2013

The Man Who Knew Infinity was a well-received biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan. Now it’s being made into a film: happy hooray! It’ll star Jeremy Irons as Hardy and Dev Patel as Ramanujan.

That’s all the news about that, for now.

More information

Jeremy Irons to Co-star in ‘The Man Who Knew Infinity’ at Variety.

Irons stars in maths genius biopic in The Belfast Telegraph. (why are all the headlines about the supporting actor?)

The Man Who Knew Infinity in the IMDB.

via Luis Guzman on Google+