Solidarity 344, 19 November 2014

Films about scientists are a rare occurrence and films about mathematicians are even rarer; it’s not hard to see why. For every Good Will Hunting, there are many more films that are quite unbearable to view, such as the vastly overrated A Beautiful Mind about the life of John Nash. But the Imitation Game is a surprisingly well-made take on the life of the father of computer science, Alan Turing. Predictably the film was lacking in the concrete mathematics, with only vague references to how exactly the Enigma machine worked, or how Turing’s machine was able to crack the code. The film can’t be...

Antonio Gramsci was a leader of the Italian Communist Party in its early days, when it was a real revolutionary party, and is now famous for the Prison Notebooks he wrote when jailed by Italy’s fascist regime between 1926 and just before his death in 1937. In this new collection of his letters from between when he was 17 and living away from home in order to study for entrance to university, and his jailing in 1926, the longest section is from just six months, between December 1923 and May 1924. Gramsci was then in Vienna, working with the Communist International (Comintern) to construct a new...