In partnership with Violet Crown Cinema, the Santa Fe Institute will present the North American Premier screening of “Adventures of a Mathematician” on September 29th, 2021 at 6:30 pm. The film will be widely released to the general public on October 1st, via Apple TV.
In this arresting account of the top-secret Manhattan Project, the brilliant Jewish-Polish mathematician Stanislaw Ulam struggles with wartime loss and moral dilemmas at the dawn of the nuclear age.
Along with his brother, Ulam escapes Poland on the eve of the Nazi invasion and eventually becomes a US citizen. His profound mastery of mathematics makes him a prized recruit to the legendary team of European scientists at Los Alamos working to develop the atomic bomb, but the young man is conflicted about his contributions to nuclear weaponry and haunted by the fate of the family he left behind in Poland. Director Thor Klein weaves an honest and poignant portrait of this brilliant and ambitious man caught in a moral crisis.
After the screening of this film, SFI President David Krakauer will moderate a Q&A with the film’s writer and director, Thor Klein, and the film’s producer, Lena Vurma.
As Krakauer explains, “Stan Ulam’s ideas and curiosity exemplify the kind of science that SFI seeks to pursue - rigorous, boundless, playful, and consequential. We name our flagship lecture series after Stan in honor of his expansive mind and the place he called his home. ”
Tickets for this one time only event can be reserved here.