Every creative contribution to the exact needs to be logically established quickly before the concentration that balances the new with the secured collapses.
It's like trying to set off a bomb designed to melt deuterium fuel, powering a hell of a hell before internal processes slow down the buildup and self-sustainability of the reaction.
That's how it was with the design of the hydrogen bomb, which its inventor, Edward Teller, struggled with until a colleague recognized the said ignition problem and found the solution.
This colleague's name was Stanisław Marcin Ulam.
Dietmar Dath
Editor in the Feuilleton.
Follow I follow
A native of Lemberg, he had had a happy childhood reading HG Wells and Jules Verne in a Polish-Jewish lower middle-class family, had escaped Hitler (unlike some he loved) and was one of the most important cadres in the middle of the last century of American military physics in the construction of the worst weapons that had existed up to that point.
Ulam was not a loner, but cultivated a highly communicative working style which, among other things, allowed him to be one of the first users to recognize the benefits of large computer systems for the expansion of classic mental work.
At the Los Alamos Military Research Center, he was inspired by the "Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer" (abbreviated: MANIAC, i.e.: madman) to develop the so-called Monte Carlo method, among other things,
Anyone wanting to make a film about Ulam's life must not allow the garish effects of the atomic age he helped usher in to outshine the quieter, darker, but perhaps more momentous dawn of the computer age, in which he was also instrumental.
And the political-psychological force fields in which this life suffered threaten to exceed any ordered narrative measure anyway.
A pencil made human
The film "Adventure of a Mathematician" has been around for two years now and is now being shown in cinemas here after delays caused by the pandemic.
The director Thorsten Klein has only changed so much of the material that his powerful theme (how does a person who wants to crush his age think beyond this age?) does not go beyond the chosen form ("realistic feature film").
As the narrative core, Klein chooses the friendship between Ulam, played by the Pole Philippe Tłokiński, and his Hungarian colleague John von Neumann, another century figure, cast with Tłokiński's compatriot Fabian Kocięcki, who (unlike the Ulam actor) hardly resembles his historical archetype , but in the interplay with the Ulam figure makes the shared intellectual existence of the two comprehensible, which finally culminates on von Neumann's deathbed in his confession that this relationship was the only sustainable one of his entire life.
Also for Ulam nothing else in this film comes close to the friendship with von Neumann,