Adventures of a Mathematician

I went into this on the hope (unlikely, but one dreams...) of a movie that actually tried to show something of the life of a mathematician, and the excitement of working with physicists at a time when so much physics was coming together.

But of course we get absolutely ZERO of that. Instead we get precisely the cliches you'd expect -- nuclear weapons are bad, mkay; family life is hard, mkay.

I don't know what goes through the mind of someone making a movie like this. Everything that is present is present done far better in a thousand other movies. Everything that would make Ulam's life especially interesting, the specific details of intellectual life, are nowhere present. You could have made the same movie about practically anyone in WW2 - family disruption, "bombing Japan, justified or not?", "people die in war". WTF cares. Ulam is ONLY interesting as a mathematician -- and yet we see nothing of that except some uninteresting references to gambling and casinos, as though gabling is the only interesting aspect of measure theory.

Truly a pointless waste of time.

Have you ever wondered why US dropped bombs on Japan 3 months after Germany surrendered and US had practically won the war!! Not only that, it dropped two bombs!!!

A moral ethical question that had troubled many brilliant minds in developing the hydrogen bomb as well as the A-bomb. One of them was Stan Ulam. A brilliant mathematician who knew the solution to the immense heat issue in the development of a Hydrogen Bomb. But he fought his own battles of morality vs his job before he could reveal the solution. He later developed the famous Monte-Carlo method from the idea that one does not need to play a game to know its conclusion. Movie lacks thrill and has somewhat poor, but average performances but good production saves a little less known interesting story and makes it a one-time watch.

As of today, August 2022, this movie has an IMDb rating of 5.5 but it is a better movie than that. Some reviews mention that it is "slow" but research and experimentation is usually like that. I can see that a person who is NOT deeply into Science and Mathematics, or the Manhattan Project in the 1940s, may have a harder time appreciating the interest and importance of this man's story.

Ulam was a Polish immigrant, a Mathematician, who crossed the Atlantic in 1939. He became a professor but after a few years was recruited to move to Los Alamos and be a part of the Manhattan Project, to develop Atomic and Hydrogen bomb technology. He had a major role but came away conflicted, the science was important but there was the guilt of creating something that could and did kill so many in the two Japanese bombings.

He eventually went back to his teaching job. He died in 1984 at the age of 75.

Good, interesting movie, I watched it at home on Amazon streaming movies.

Poor directing, long pauses and unnecessary scenes make it painstakingly slow and boring. There are no adventures or any sort of interesting dialogues or scenes.

I am a math teacher who frequently looks for quality movies depicting science/mathematics to entice my students to the beauty of these disciplines. Examples of this are Contact, A beautiful mind, The imitation game, etc. This movie though, I would never recommend it to anyone. It's very slow, bland, poorly directed, poorly acted and just... plain boring. It's not a bad movie, but it's asymptotically close to be one.

It's difficult to make such a historical project and such a once-in-a-lifetime gathering of geniuses (Neumann, Ulam, Teller, Oppenheimer, ...) look dull but this movie achieves precisely that.

The only actor that was close to deliver a good performance was the one depicting Edward Teller. He was able to incarnate the acrid, warring personality of that scientist.