The Calculus of Love (short)
Ambition collides with logic in the quest to solve a 250-year old mathematical puzzle. Starring Keith Allen.
Writer/ Director: Dan Clifton
A professor who is obsessed with proving Goldbach’s Conjecture challenges a class of graduate students to make any progress on it. But, is he truly motivated by a love of pure mathematics and its search for truth, or will baser human emotions get in the way when one of the students seems to succeed?
In an interview, the writer/director says “I’ve made a lot of films about science and with scientists. I’ve always been interested in the idea that science is a noble pursuit for the truth, but that the pursuers — scientists themselves — suffer from all the usual human flaws. A character’s obsession with proving an unsolved mathematical conjecture felt like a good way to dramatise this conflict.”
There are lots of things I like about this movie, and only a few things I don’t like. As it is only 15 minutes long and free, I suggest you watch it before reading on because my discussion will include a few spoilers.
The film is well acted and directed; I can see why it won some awards at short film festivals. The film touches on (but does not say much about) the important topic of sexism in mathematics. And, although I hope nobody thinks this is a common or even realistic situation, the idea of a math graduate course that is so challenging that 70% of the students will fail is intriguing.
Spoiler
Finally, of course, I vicariously enjoyed the sweet revenge as the heroine of the film gets even with this jerk of a professor.
On the other hand, there is a noticeable shortage of both calculus and love in this film, and so I’m not sure I like the title. More significantly, I have two big problems with the idea that a young woman with a proof of Goldbach’s Conjecture would need help from a professor in order to get recognition. One problem is that I don’t believe it is true and so it spoils the story for me. After all, she could just go get it published without involving the professor. Couldn’t she get better revenge by actually getting the fame and recognition he so desires? And, my other problem with this is that I’m afraid it will give viewers a misconception of the field of mathematics. One of the wonderful things about math is that you don’t have to be part of some club to get recognized for making an important discovery. If anyone had a proof (or disproof) of Goldbach’s Conjecture it would not matter who they were. (Consider, for example, the case of Yitang Zhang).
https://kasmana.people.charleston.edu/MATHFICT/mfview.php?callnumber=mf1158
Yitang Zhang (Chinese: 张益唐; born February 5, 1955) is a Chinese-American mathematician primarily working on number theory and a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Barbara since 2015. In 2025, he was appointed a professor at Sun Yat-sen University.
Zhang was born in Shanghai, China, with his ancestral home in Pinghu, Zhejiang. He lived in Shanghai with his grandmother until he went to Peking University. At around the age of nine, he found a proof of the Pythagorean theorem. He first learned about Fermat’s Last Theorem and Goldbach’s conjecture when he was 10. During the Cultural Revolution, he and his mother were sent to the countryside to work in the fields. He worked as a laborer for 10 years and was unable to attend high school. After the Cultural Revolution ended, Zhang entered Peking University in 1978 as an undergraduate student and received a Bachelor of Science in mathematics in 1982. He became a graduate student of Professor Pan Chengbiao, a number theorist at Peking University, and obtained a Master of Science in mathematics in 1984.
After receiving his master’s degree in mathematics, with recommendations from Professor Ding Shisun, the President of Peking University, and Professor Deng Donggao, chair of the university’s Math Department, Zhang was granted a full scholarship at Purdue University. Zhang arrived at Purdue in January 1985, studied there for six and a half years, and obtained his PhD in mathematics in December 1991.
After some years, Zhang managed to find a position as a lecturer at the University of New Hampshire, where he was hired by Kenneth Appel in 1999. Prior to getting back to academia, he worked for several years as an accountant and a delivery worker for a New York City restaurant. He also worked in a motel in Kentucky and in a Subway sandwich shop. A profile published in Quanta Magazine reports that Zhang used to live in his car during the initial job-hunting days. He served as lecturer at UNH from 1999 until around January 2014, when UNH appointed him to a full professorship as a result of his breakthrough on prime numbers. Zhang stayed for a semester at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, in 2014, and he joined the University of California, Santa Barbara in fall 2015. He took a full-time position at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China on June 27, 2025.