News flash: the Barry Mazur film is finally online
The 35-minute documentary was created by Oliver Ralfe
When it dawned on a few of his friends and students that Barry Mazur was on the verge of turning 80, we decided that this milestone in the life of such an unusual thinker and colleague deserved to be celebrated in an unusual way. The result was the film Barry Mazur and the Infinite Cheese of Knowledge. The film was completed by the British musician and filmmaker Oliver Ralfe in 2021 and was first screened simultaneously at the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHES) outside of Paris and the International Centre for Mathematical Sciences in Edinburgh, as well as online, on December 8 of that year.
The International Mathematical Union made the film available for streaming during the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians, to honor Mazur as recipient that year of the Chern Medal. Last summer the IHES purchased the film from Ralfe, and since July 5 of this year it has been freely available on YouTube.
Much of the footage, including this brief clip
was filmed during a conference in Mazur’s honor at Harvard in 2018.
Ralfe filmed most of the lectures — including all of the interdisciplinary panels listed on the right in the above poster — and they can also be viewed on the IHES YouTube channel.
From the beginning the response to the film has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. I’m grateful for the opportunity to have worked with Kobi Kremnitzer and Minhyong Kim to provide Ralfe with the means to bring it to fruition.1 I’m also grateful to the IHES for making it available to anyone with an internet connection, and I encourage all readers to spend half an hour getting to know Mazur and his world.
But what does this have to do with mechanization of mathematics? The title of the film contains one hint, and the title of the Harvard conference contains a very big hint. Even if the conversationally gifted cyberdictator Alpha 60 from Godard’s Alphaville were interested in mathematics, who would want to watch a movie about its life story?
Apart from that, the Mazur swindle, which Mazur’s Harvard colleague Curt McMullen expains in the clip, is based on an apparent explicit breaking of a rule of basic mathematics: specifically, the rule that you can’t exchange the order of summation in an infinite series that doesn’t converge absolutely. Nevertheless, as McMullen exclaims at the end of the clip, “it works!” Silicon Valley and the prophets of mechanized mathematics have only interpreted the rules in various ways. The point, however, is to know how and when to break them.
As a bonus, absolutely everyone who appears in the film has a Kevin Bacon number of at most 3, because one of the mathematicians visible at 33:10 has a Bacon number of 2 and is even cited in the Wikipedia article on the Erdős–Bacon number. Wikipedia editors take note!
The film like its subject is a treasure. Thanks to you and others for making it happen. The scene of wind and waves at the ocean/bay creates an unstated allusion to Grothendieck as one of Barry M’s primal philosophical and mathematical influences, nicely done.