The film, a German-Polish-British production, was written and directed by Berlin-based director Thor Klein. It was premiered at the Palm Springs International Film Festival in the United States and at the Amplify Film Festival in the UK under the title Adventures of a Mathematician.
The main protagonist is played by Philippe Tłokiński, who was born in France in 1985 and has developed a career both there and in Poland. Esther Garrel plays the mathematician’s wife, Françoise Aron, who was French.
Ulam was born into a wealthy Polish Jewish family in 1909 in Lemberg (Lwów in Polish; now Lviv in Ukraine). He studied at the city’s Polytechnic Institute and became a member of the famous Lwów School of Mathematics in interwar Poland.
In 1936, he headed to America to pursue an academic career. After becoming a US citizen in 1943 he was recruited to work on the development of a new weapon, the nuclear bomb, at the Los Alamos laboratory near Santa Fe, New Mexico.
The film gives an account of Ulam’s contributions to the fields of mathematics and nuclear physics. It also tackles moral questions relating to nuclear weapons, as Ulam and other scientists are caught between a desire to help their families back in Europe and the destructive power of the weapons they are developing.
(mk/pk)
