Since I teach math, I have found it interesting to see how the subject is depicted in movies and on TV. I gave a talk on this topic at the American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges' national conference in Pittsburgh. The presentation included clips of some of the more interesting examples I have found.
Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, 2008
Kumar's Poem
Directed by Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg.
Contact, 1997
A film based on a story by Carl Sagan, written by Ann Druyan, directed by Robert Zemeckis, and starring Jodie Foster. Foster plays a scientist searching for signals from space. The first contact is made using prime numbers. Why prime numbers? "Because mathematics is the universal language."
Home Improvement
Bye Bye Birdie, 1993
This episode was written by Susan Estelle Jansen, directed by Andy Cadiff, and produced by Gayle S. Maffeo. The title comes from the second plot in the show that has Tim Taylor trying to get rid of a annoying woodpecker. The plot I find more fun has Tim and Jill teaching son Brad how to multiply compound fractions. In the end, Tim's assistant Al uses the technique to calculate the area of a floor. The only problem is he gets the wrong answer.
Taylor Got Game, 1998
Brad Taylor gets an offer to play professional soccer in England. He considers the offer because he is nervous about his math score on the SAT. The opening scene has some good math related lines. The episode was written by Jonathan Pollack, directed by Geoffrey Nelson, and produced by Alan Padula.
In The Navy, 1941
This Abbot and Costello movie is truly my all-time favorite. It contains the classic routine, 7 times 13 is 28. Lou 'proves' this using multiplication, repeated addition, and division. This Universal Pictures film was directed by Arthur Luben and written by Arthur T. Horman.
Infinity, 1996
An independent film from First Look Pictures, written by Patricia Broderick and Richard Feynman, with Matthew Broderick as both director and star. The film is based on the early life of Richard Feynman. The film has many scenes dealing with topics in both math and physics. One has Feynman visiting Chinatown where he has a calculating competition against a shopkeeper using an abacus. Our hero wins but the fun is in listening as he explains how he did the mental calculations.
I happen to know that a cubic foot contains 1728 cubic inches, so the answer is just a tiny bit more than 12. The excess, the difference between the guy's number and the number of inches in a cubic foot is 1.03 and that's only one part in nearly two thousand, and I know that in calculus that for small fractions, the cube root's excess is one-third of the number's excess. So all I had to do is find the fraction one over 1728 multiply by four (divide by 3 and multiply by 12). So I was able to pull out a whole bunch of extra digits that way.
The second scene is at the end of the film where Feynman explains why there is no largest number, thus the name of the film.
Little Big League, 1994
The film tells the story of young Billy Heywood who inherits a baseball team and becomes the team's manager. He has trouble concentrating on the big game because he has a math test the next day. The members of the team try to help him solve a "story problem" that all math teachers are familiar with, "if Sam can paint a house in 3 days" The players' 'solutions' are typical of all students. In the end they do get the correct answer but really have no idea why. The film is from Lobell/Bergman Productions, written by Gregory Pincus and directed by Andrew Schernman.
Little Man Tate, 1991
This Orion Pictures film tells the story of a boy gifted with great mathematical ability. Fred Tate (Adam Hann-Byrd) travels to the Olympics of the Mind where his gift is finally appreciated. The film was written by Scott Frank and directed by Jodie Foster.
Merry Andrew, 1958
A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film, directed by Michael Kidd, written by IAL Diamond, Paul Gallico , and Isabel Lennart, and starring Danny Kaye as a teacher in an English public school. The film contains a production number on the Pythagorean Theorem. "The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the two adjacent sides."
The Simpsons
Treehouse of Horror VI, 1995
The last part of this Simpsons' Halloween trilogy has Homer slipping into 3D land. The episode is a salute to a Twilight Zone episode, but Homer encounters mathematics everywhere he looks. From a simple 1 + 1 = 2 to a contradiction of Fermat's Last Theorem, math is everywhere you look. This episode was written by John Swartzwelder, Steve Tompkins and David S. Cohen and directed by Bob Anderson.
Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, 1971
Directed by Mel Stuart and written by Roald Dahl, this David L. Wolper production has become a children's classic. There is one scene related to math where the teacher is explaining (very badly) the concept of a percent.
Wizard of Oz, 1939
This Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film is another classic. Directed Victor Fleming and written by Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf the film is based on the series written by L. Frank Baum. If you listen closely to the scarecrow when he gets his brain you will hear what is supposed to be the Pythagorean Theorem but involves square roots of sides of an isosceles triangle. No such line appears in the original books.
