Between Genius and Insanity

Between Genius and Insanity

By Georg Scholl

If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all. Whenever films are supposed to feature researchers, scriptwriters always come up with the same ideas. Unless, of course, we are talking mathematics. Why Hollywood loves heroes with numbers on the brain.

Insane numbers games? The schizophrenic mathematician as hero in the Oscar award- winning film biography of the Nobel Prize Winner John Nash “A Beautiful Mind”. Foto: Imagine Entertainment/ Filmbild Fundus

Marine biologist Matt Hooper had expressly told everyone that Carcharodon carcharias had a voracious appetite. But nobody wanted to listen. Finally, the great white shark was devouring one bather after the other. The researcher in Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster “Jaws” is one of those archetypal scientists we still meet in the cinema today. Hooper is the admonisher, also known as the voice in the wilderness (typical line: “I warned you!”). The admonisher is usually a biologist, though sometimes a meteorologist or volcano expert, someone who researches into things that can turn really nasty when they get out of control.

Mathematicians, especially of the theoretical variety, fail to qualify for the role of the admonisher for obvious, subject-related reasons. They don’t fit in other popular pigeonholes for researchers either. Along with the admonisher comes the penitent (typical line: “Oh God, what have I done?”) who can’t put the genie of applied science back in the bottle. Examples include: cloned dinosaurs, robots which develop free will, invisibility potions which get into the wrong hands etc., etc. Other standard figures are the mad scientist (just think of Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove or the innumerable portrayals of Frankenstein) or Jerry Lewis’ nutty professor in the eponymous film. The researchers in this kind of role are usually into chemistry or atomic power. With notable exceptions like the archaeologist Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones, who is really more of an adventurer than a researcher, Hollywood usually ignores scholars of literature, philosophy and the other humanities completely.

Whether admonisher, penitent or mad professor, researchers are usually banished to the minor roles where one is basically much like the other: the means to the end of guiding the plot back onto the familiar path leading to the predictable end. While the mad scientist is bound to be a dubious character, though not necessarily a scientific ace, and you can certainly become a penitent by accidentally pouring the green liquid into the test tube with the blue contents, mathematics require something more. Here you only get to the top if you’re a genius, according to the big screen, which then elects mathematicians as its heroes.

The audience normally meets the typical big screen-mathematician in the guise of a genius on the verge of insanity. Real mathematicians may groan at this as they do about the decorative but incorrect formulae and scientific nonsense presented in maths films. But the cliché is the key to understanding why Hollywood takes mathematics more seriously than other disciplines. Cinema, namely, is interested in how genius and madness fit together. It is, indeed, so interested that it actually makes a researcher the topic of a whole film for once.

The madman as hero

The most famous example is “A Beautiful Mind”, the Oscar winning film biography of Nobel prize winner John Nash. Nash, who suffers from schizophrenia, is not denounced as a mad professor but portrayed as a hero with enormous empathy and all of Hollywood’s very own brand of pathos. Are the mysteries of mathematics so impenetrable that the human intellect trying to solve them is forced across the border of what is considered to be normal and mentally healthy? Do mathematics drive you mad? Or do you have to be mad in the first place if you want to become a great mathematician? Films like “Pi” and “Proof ” also point in this direction.

“The viewer discovers that you can actually solve a case with the help of mathematics.”

In “Pi”, the hero gets paranoid while theorising over a 216-digit variation of the number Pi and believes he is being pursued by secret services and conspiratorial groups who are all after the number. In “Proof “, Anthony Hopkins plays a brilliant but insane mathematician. His daughter, equally gifted in the discipline, starts to ask herself whether she hasn’t only inherited her father’s talent but also his insanity. Our amazement about people with autism, such as “Rain Main” played by Dustin Hoff man, who has an extraordinary gift for mathematics, shows how fascinated we are by a discipline which transcends the imagination and abilities of Mr. and Mrs. Average and is apparently founded in a secret world where ordinary mortals will never tread.

But it can be done without the madness as we see in “Enigma”, a film about the mathematician Alan Turing, who helped to decode the settings of the German cipher machine Enigma during the second World War and thus to decrypt the orders radioed to the German submarine fleet. In the film the team working with Turing easily trumps the typical ensemble found in war films. The heroes are not the spies and the soldiers but the men with the brilliant brains. 

In the film “Pi” a paranoid maths genius thinks he has found the key to understanding the universe in a 216-digit number. Foto: Artisan Entertainment/ Filmbild Fundus

Another typical film is double Oscar winner “Good Will Hunting” about a highly-gifted casual labourer who is able to emerge from the ranks of the poorly educated to become a mathematical star. Will is a genius. He’s not mad, but he is a social misfit. He quickly and easily leaves his mentor, a luminary in his field, way behind him, but he is indifferent to the laurels of academia. Directors and authors love such offb eat wunderkinder. Perhaps the success of “Good Will Hunting” could be repeated with a film about Grigori Perelman? In 2006, the Russian mathematician hit the headlines by refusing one of the most prestigious honours in his discipline, the Fields Medal. It might be worth getting hold of the film rights for his biography.

But although the popularity mathematicians enjoy might be the envy of other subjects, it doesn’t make them happy. On the contrary. Lots of films mean lots of errors. And that’s why Jonathan Farley, professor of mathematics at Harvard, has set up the firm Hollywood Math and Science Film Consulting, which advises scriptwriters on the realistic and correct presentation of mathematics on screen. His clients include the current successful American detective serial “Numb3rs”. The hero is, of course, a brilliant professor of mathematics who helps out his brother at the FBI when he gets stuck on an awkward case. The viewer discovers that you can actually solve a case with the help of applied mathematics. And this is where the mathematicians start taking possession of a genre that was previously the prerogative of psychologists working as profilers, or forensic scientists. It would appear that the maths virus is continuing to spread. But we certainly don’t have to worry about the fate of the admonishers and penitents in the face of catastrophe – the next film featuring a lab accident and its consequences is inevitable. And then, probably, it’ll contain the immortal line: “Oh God, what have I done?” – and almost certainly not a single mathematician.