Mereghetti’s testimony “Margherita’s Theorem”, the power of mathematics as a formula for emancipation (score 7-) – Corriere.it

You don’t have to do math mix with feelings: Laurent Warner (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), professor at the Paris École Normale Supérieure – known to everyone as ENS – repeats this again and again to his doctoral student Marguerite Hoffman (Ella Rumpf). You must know Control your emotions in dealing with numbers, but for Marguerite the discipline that Warner wants to impose on her it falls apart when he presents the results of his research on the topic Goldbach’s conjecture: Another graduate student has just arrived from Oxford, Lucas Savelli (Julien Frison), whom Warner surprisingly agreed to follow, noticed an error and he says it in front of everyone. And Marguerite’s world collapses around her: humiliated and desperate, she leaves the classroom, but also her doctoral project. Want close permanently with mathematics.

About twenty minutes have passed since the film and the French-Swedish director began Anna Novion, 44 years oldShe has put the parts of her work into play, which immediately leads her to the Antipodes Combination of genius and madness which often appeared in films about mathematics and mathematicians. Only woman in a world of Only menMarguerite must learn to deal with her own femininity, which will play an important role in her evolutionsince he has to find a place to go (he has definitely completed the ENS and his scholarship. If the cut has to be clean, let it be clean) and meets Noa (Sonia Bonny), an unemployed dancer, whose body it doesn’t go unnoticed not even in the eyes of Marguerite, who had eliminated feelings, with their attachments and connections, not only from mathematics but also from her life.

This is the first of them Big changes what Marguerite must do: rediscover that she has a body, a physicality that has its demands and needs (and that will “satisfy” the young woman in the most direct and surprising way). The second is the art of living together, adapts to the needs of her roommate, who isn’t exactly the calmest or most traditional one out there. And the third discovery is that mathematics is something of its own stringent logic It can also have practical applications that are sometimes counterproductive (like getting you fired from a pollster for demonstrating this).Illogical questions that he should ask his customers) sometimes surprising when he uses his rational mind to play – and win – in the Tavoli in Mahjong which abounds in the neighborhood where he lives (13th arrondissement).

Up to mathematics, which Marguerite has practiced since childhood and helps her mother, a teacher Correct algebra homework of her students, does not make their needs heard again: The Chinese game with its rules and logic awakens the spirit of the former doctoral student he starts thinking again about Goldabch and the Supposition which he had formulated in 1742, according to which every number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers. An intuition that, according to the film, we are still waiting for a demonstration and that Marguerite begins hypothesizing by painting the walls of her room black to use as a blackboard.

With the advice of mathematician Ariane Mézard the equations (absolutely real according to the director) begins to cover the walls and Marguerite finds this Enjoy research, this time with young Lucas on a journey of reclaiming his own identity, as a woman and as a mathematician. The old professor is excluded from this, as if he were looking for a new identity that the two doctoral students want earn on the field (actually on the blackboard walls that also invade Noa’s room) rather than in a traditional academic route. And the young actress Ella Rumpf knows that unsightly from the hairstyle and a few intellectual glasses In the old style, he knows how to enliven, as if he were the ugly duckling rediscovering his beauty, this time through his own mathematical intuitions. Along with a well-deserved one Cesar 2024 as better female revelation of the year.

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