Lecture by Robert Osserman

Mathematician Robert Osserman will trace the evolving depictions of mathematicians and mathematics in movies over the past fifty years. Osserman is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Stanford University, and has been Special Projects Director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley since 1995. He has appeared in a number of radio and television programs discussing mathematics, its applications, and its interaction with theater and cinema.

(Morte di un matematico Napoletano). Mario Martone, one of Italy's most imaginative experimental theater innovators, made a striking cinematic debut with this subtle, dreamlike work about a bizarre mathematical genius who committed suicide in Naples in 1959. On the evening of May Day, 1959, a drunkard is stopped by police. Presumed to be a vagrant, he is in fact Renato Caccioppolli, an esteemed mathematics professor at Naples University, grandson of the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, and a Communist. Thus begins the last week of the professor's life. It is a life told as a kind of collage, with drinking bouts and existential torments puncturing the memories of a man who experienced some of the worst horrors of the twentieth century. The film's views of a vanished Naples add a sensuous visual pleasure to Martone's rigorous portrait of not only a man, but an entire culture.