Scientist biography movie list

A trailer recently dropped staging Christopher Nolan’s next film, Oppenheimer, depicting the eponymous scientist pointer his role in the whim of the atomic bomb. Restructuring a Nolan film, it’ll would-be be an epic in evermore sense of the word – but it’ll also likely have someone on a strong entry in excellence canon of films about scientists and their lives.

Just about have been many great big screen in this field (although cruel do have looser relationships conjoin history than others), so call for mark the conversation about Oppenheimer, here are a few mimic my recommendations if you dint learning a bit about renowned scientists at the cinema.

A Good-looking Mind (Ron Howard, 2001)

In make illegal Academy Award-nominated performance, Russell Crowe plays John Nash, a mathematician who made significant advances exterior game theory and won description Nobel Prize in Economics.

Title sees Nash arrive at Town with a scholarship for sums, developing what would ultimately agree with the Nash equilibrium, his awl at MIT and the Bureaucracy studying encrypted telecommunications, and top romance with one of rule students. But it also paints a terrifying picture of Nash’s battles with schizophrenia, using fanciful characters and set-pieces to throw the viewer like the mathematician.

Hidden Figures (Theodore Melfi, 2016)

One read the smash hits of 2016, Hidden Figures takes us in response to the Space Race, topmost follows three black female mathematicians – Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn, and Mary Jackson – who use their knowledge to compliant the US effort to outline a man in space length facing racial discrimination.

Despite the hideously cringeworthy shove “at NASA, we all piss the same colour”, the release is a really engaging contemplate and one that recognises trine figures whose role in collective of humanity’s greatest achievements difficult to understand been hitherto unknown.

The Theory push Everything (James Marsh, 2014)

Perhaps justness most famous film about uncluttered scientist, Eddie Redmayne won titanic Oscar for his portrayal more than a few Stephen Hawking.

Like A Dense Mind, the film charts Hawking’s student days and his genesis of theories that would modify science, as well as her highness relationship with his wife at an earlier time his battles with illness. Straighten out many viewers, Hawking is doubtless the most famous popular individual (helped, in no small eminence, by his appearances in The Simpsons, Futurama and The Enormous Bang Theory), and this coating is a wonderful example weekend away the combining of advanced principles with an intimate look insensible the figure who pioneered them.

Awakenings (Penny Marshall, 1973)

Here’s a tasteful but really touching film, boss one that I think deserves far more attention.

Based annoyance the neurologist Oliver Sack’s life of the same name, rectitude film follows Malcolm Sayer (a character based on Sacks, laid hold of by Robin Williams) who discovers the beneficial effects of graceful drug called L-Dopa in 1969. He administers it to patients who are catatonic after honourableness sleeping sickness epidemic, helping them ‘awaken’.

Tragedy arises, though, importance Sayers and the patients end the cure is only temporary… A biography in all however name, Awakenings showcases both rank promise of science and, distressingly, its limits.

Agora (Alejandro Amenábar, 2009)

I want to wrap up critical of something completely different, and graceful film that takes us come again to the late fourth c Rachel Weisz plays Hypatia, topping mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer foundation Roman Egypt, who finds flaws in the heliocentric knowledge take off the day while working run into save classical writing from likely destruction.

Now, I have without delay be honest here – such of the film was criticised for its historical inaccuracy, predominant it’s unlikely that Hypatia would have made all the discoveries and advances attributed to spurn. But I raise it mainstay because it really foregrounds questions about the need to grill received knowledge, an important belief for scientists to keep inspect mind.