Adventures of a Mathematician (2020)

The biopic tells the story of the renowned Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam, who, for the obvious reasons, emigrated from Poland to the U.S. in 1936 and was involved in the famous Manhattan Project (invited by none less than John von Neumann, the scientist in whose honour the von Neumann architecture used in all modern computers was named). His brother also managed to move away and became a history professor at Harvard, while Ulam’s mother passed away in Vienna shortly before the war, and his father and sister were killed in a ghetto, and even the years of their deaths remain unknown. This family history tortures Ulam when he finds himself in a strange land working on a horrible weapon — the hydrogen bomb. He also has difficult relationships with his brother, who wants to renounce Judaism, and with his own self. This film is a case when a straightforward life history of one scientist tells a bigger tale. The German director Thor Klein, for whom this is only a second film, figured out how to avoid the boring kind of a fact-filled narration, and instead lay out someone else’s life in front of us with all its joys and sorrows.