If you get a chance to view “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” go for it. Award-winning actors abound in this tale of math wits at Cambridge University who contributed dozens of important ideas that are still being used in business and science. Dev Patel, stars as the self-taught math genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan, who rose from poverty to team with world-renowned scholars such as Bertrand Russell and John Edensor Littlewood. Based on a book of the same name by Robert Kanigel, this biographical tale of talent writ large examines the unlikely friendship between Mr. Ramanujan and his mentor, Professor G. H. Hardy (played wonderfully by Jeremy Irons), the uncertainties of a war torn England and the dire loneliness of the young man who left his home in India to share his insights about numbers.

Sadly, Mr. Ramanujan died in his thirties, leaving a legacy of path-breaking equations that have since been proven right. According to a 2012 article in Business Insider, his work is used by physicists to compute “the entropy, or level of disorder, of black holes.” Last month, the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research, Stephen Wolfram, reviewed Hollywood’s take on this band of merry mathematicians and pondered how they could have saved countless hours had they had access to his Mathematica product that is used by many Wall Street quants. His admiration for this driven wunderkind is obvious, as is his hope “that many more people will take advantage of the tools we have today to follow Ramanujan’s lead and make great discoveries in experimental mathematics – whether they announce them in unexpected letters or not.”

Popcorn aside, The Man Who Knew Infinity is captivating and well worth a trip to the cinema.