Adventures of a Mathematician

Adventures of a Mathematician

Sloan Foundation Film

Release Date

2020

Director

  • Thorsten Klein

Cast

  • Ryan Gage
  • Sabin Tambrea
  • Mateusz Wieclawek

Awards

  • 2017 Tribeca Film Institute Filmmaker Fund: Screenplay Development Award
  • 2017 Film Independent: Producer's Grant
  • 2019 Tribeca Film Institute: Sloan Discretionary Fund

Polish immigrant and mathematician Stan Ulam helps create the hydrogen bomb and the first computer.

Based on the autobiography “Adventures of a Mathematician” by Stanislaw Ulam.

Cambridge, USA, 1942.

Stan Ulam is a 30-year-old talented Polish Jewish mathematician, a good-looking bon vivant who is quick with a joke. Stan’s life becomes complicated when he loses his fellowship at Harvard, but his best friend, the Hungarian genius Johnny von Neumann, quickly offers him a mysterious job which takes him to New Mexico.

Stan moves to Los Alamos with Françoise, a French woman he meets and marries after a whirlwind romance. Surrounded by young, eccentric, charismatic immigrant scientists, Stan begins top secret work on a nuclear bomb that could potentially blow up the entire world.

While desperately trying to help his sister flee Nazi-occupied Poland, Stan teams up with Johnny to create the first computer, giving birth to the digital age as Europe bursts into flames.

Banner image courtesy of

Possible Topics

  • The Manhattan Project and nuclear weapons
  • Science and ethics
  • The birth of computers