Colm O'Regan: I'm stumped by the maths in the movies
Hidden Figures: the best blackboard, says Colm O'Regan
What do you remember from school? And why? There are the effects of glaciation on a V-shaped valley.
Those 3D diagrams where you get to play the role of a glacier. The power!
There are the go tobanns and the nós na gaoithes, the mortar of an Irish essay. Biology had the infamous phytophtora infestans and especially beloved in Cork Islets of Langerhans.
But this Maths Week, how many memories are from maths? Bombdas? There are no ox-bow lakes to soothe the soul.
I’m sure students don’t have time to be hearing stories at this stage. It’s all “dropping down to pass”, past papers, and patterns. It’s a pity because there are stories to be told.
There’s a reason why there’s a respectable number of films about maths. Stuff can get dramatic. Some films are ‘pure mad altogther’.
by Darren Aaronovsky is a fever dream about a fella looking for a 216-digit number and the evil stock market guys and Jewish mystics are after him.
Generally, the movies think if you’re good at maths, you’re a bit mad. There’s lots of feverish working into the night. Like the night before Paper 2. But for months.
The mathematics-based movie has a number of tropes we recognise.
Greek symbols mean it’s tricky, someone is obsessed, they think of something and run to an obscure book and open it to the page, a hot woman is the only one who “gets them”, the jocks are stupid.
The classic is the blackboard. Blackboards scream “solving stuff”.
— the true story of three African-American female mathematicians — Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson who were vital to the success of putting humans safely into space — has the best blackboard.
It’s huge. Katherine Johnson needs a ladder at one point.
Movie blackboards are often analysed by mathematicians and apparently this one stands up as being fairly accurate.
Incidentally, and don’t ask how I know this, a few years ago, a website was set up devoted to analysing the quality of the maths on blackboards in porn films. Some of them… er… stand up quite well, too, apparently.
Five hundred movies apparently feature maths of some sort, and there are other movies to be made.
The legend of the Greek mathematician thrown overboard by Pythagoras — yes, that one — has cult followers because he discovered an irrational number?
The man who sued a toilet paper company because they used his mathematical pattern on their loo-roll?
The Norwegian who solved a 300-year old problem, quit because he was poor, and hadn’t made any money and then died TWO DAYS before the arrival of a letter saying he had been given a top job.
Teenagers — are you prone to dramatic gestures and also wondering about the point of those algebraic expressions known as polynomials?
Look no further than your buddy, 19th-century mathematician Évariste Galois who managed to be an expert at polynomials and the MOST DRAMATIC FRENCHMAN EVER.
He died in a duel over a woman, and the night before, he wrote down all the maths he knew in the form of a series of letters he sent to others.
Now THAT’S what I call main character energy.
Or Sophie Germain — the early 19th-century French mathematician who had to pretend to be a man to get people to believe her work, whose parents disapproved of her studying maths, so they would not allow a fire in her bedroom for light to study.
But she had secret quilts and candles. That old trick.
Admittedly these might be shorts or arthouse or if they get blockbuster, some people might have to live a bit longer. Still. There’s stories there that are a lot better than BOMDAS.
- For more about mathsweek check out https://www.mathsweek.ie/2025/
