Math Goes to the Movies
Burkard Polster, Marty Ross
John Hopkins University Press (7 septembre 2012)
252 pages

The first several chapters discuss in detail specific popular movies containing significant mathematics, such as Good Will Hunting (1997). The later chapters present lots of fun mathematical movie trivia. Some other movies which the book goes into detail with are Stand and Deliver (1988), A Beautiful Mind (2001), Pi (1998), and It's My Turn (1980). As mentioned, the later chapters present lots of fun mathematical movie trivia. For example, in Die Hard with a Vengeance ("Die Hard 3"), the characters played by Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson are given various puzzles by the character played by Jeremy Irons. Some of these are mathematical in nature and are discussed in detail.
A good sense of what the book is about can be determined from a list of chapter titles.

  1. Good math hunting
  2. The clever hand behind "A Beautiful Mind"
  3. Escalante Stands and Delivers
  4. The annotated Pi files
  5. Nitpicking in Mathmagic land
  6. Escape from the Cube
  7. The incredible shrinking room
  8. Murder in the hot house
  9. A word problem for die hards
  10. 7×13=28
  11. One mirror has two faces, two mirrors have ...
  12. It's my turn for some serious mathematics
  13. Beautiful math, or better off dead
  14. Pythagoreas and Fermat at the movies
  15. Survival in the fourth dimension
  16. To infinity and beyond!
  17. Problem corner
  18. Money-back bloopers
  19. The funny files
  20. People lists
  21. Topic lists