The most legendary mathematical tricks, the worst stumbling blocks in the history of physics and all kinds of formulas whose meaning hardly anyone can see: these are the inhabitants of Freistetter’s world of formulas.
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I was recently at the cinema. I watched the film “The Equation of Her Life” (original title: “Le Théorème de Marguerite”). The film is about the young mathematician Marguerite Hoffmann, who is just finishing her doctoral thesis. Her topic is the Goldbach conjecture, which revolves around this formula:
If an even number (greater than two) is the sum of two prime numbers (p and q), this is called the Goldbach decomposition. In 1742, the German mathematician Christian Goldbach conjectured that this is possible for all even numbers. To date, however, there is no proof that this conjecture is correct.
Goldbach’s conjecture is one of the most famous unproven statements in mathematics, which is certainly due to the fact that it can be easily understood without much prior knowledge. And that was probably also the reason why director Anna Novion chose the topic for her feature film. It is difficult enough to portray “normal” science in a reasonably accurate way in the cinema. But when it comes to mathematics, it is almost impossible. Without the appropriate prior knowledge, there is almost no chance of understanding what modern mathematics is concerned with. Goldbach’s conjecture is an exception: on the one hand, it is understandable and on the other hand, significant enough to actually play the role it takes on in “The Equation of Her Life”.
