Math, Mental Illness And Ron Howard: Science On The Screen Series Kicks Off With A Beautiful Mind

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Nov 30, 2012 10:40PM

A Beautiful Mind, the Oscar-winning 2001 film about the life and struggles of one of the 20th century's more influential mathematicians, John Nash, has all the hallmarks of Ron Howard's best work—a crowd-pleasing, tear-jerking, and even sentimentalized tale of triumph over adversity. It remains Howard's most lauded film; no mean feat while spinning a tale about math and mental illness and casting a fresh-from-Gladiator Russell Crowe against type.

While commercially and critically successful entertainment, A Beautiful Mind has fared even better as a humanizing portrayal of schizophrenia that whose contribution to ameliorating the stigma of mental illness endures. Watching someone universally recognized as a genius struggle with schizophrenia and confront the misunderstandings and mistreatments which have historically added to its burden has had a powerful effect recognized even at the time.

Screening next week as the inaugural film in the University of Chicago’s new "Science on the Screen" series, A Beautiful Mind will occasion a discussion of Nash, mental illness, economics and mathematics from Nobel Prize-winning Professor of Economics Roger Meyerson and Michael Marcangelo, M.D., Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience. We're glad to see University taking advantage of their own stable of beautiful minds and connecting its Art/Science Initiative with the The Chicago Council for Science and Technology to produce this program, with two more "Science on the Screen" programs planned.

A Beautiful Mind screens at 6 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 6 in Screening Room 201 of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E 60th Street. Admission is $7, $5 for students.