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Mathematics Goes to the Movies

by Burkard Polster and Marty Ross

A Pure Formality (Una Pura Formalita) (1994)

15:40
Book title: Geometry

30:00
ONOFF: Every day for the last ten years I’ve woken up at exactly 3:30 am.
INSPECTOR: Just like Shannon in Geometry.
ONOFF: Right, just like the hero of Geometry.

1:15:00
INSPECTOR: Every seen this man Mr. February?
ONOFF: Seems to me I know him.
INSPECTOR: Who is he?
ONOFF: My math teacher when I was in high school.
INSPECTOR: What else?
ONOFF: It’s to him I owe my passion for numbers, for symmetry, for geometric reasoning. Professor Trivarchi: He set forth theorems as if they were fables. His words didn’t go through our ears, they went directly to our minds. And I was truly moved. “Two parallel lines can never meet. Nonetheless, it is possible to imagine the existence of a point so far out in space so far into infinity that we can believe and acknowledge that our two lines do in fact meet there. We shall call this point the ideal point.