From Brigitte Bardot to Angelina Jolie

Abstract

It is the 1960s, and Brigitte Bardot is at the height of her success. She appears as herself in a film entitled simply Dear Brigitte [1]. By simply calling the film that everyone immediately knew what is was about. She was the dream girl of the son of the character played by James Stewart. Stewart’s character, Robert Leaf, is a poet and professor of English literature in an American university. He is perennially in conflict with the scientists at his university, holding science to be dry, and scientific training, particularly mathematics, to be of little use. One day tragedy strikes at home (a sort of tragedy, of course, since the film is a family comedy). Leaf’s son, who goes to elementary school, is a mathematical genius. Or better, the boy has a gift for mental calculation. In ordinary language, and thus also in movies, we often find ‘mathematical genius’ used for those who can perform rapid calculations in their heads. His teacher discovered this by chance, and quite pleased, goes to tell the boy’s parents. When he hears that his son is a mathematics whiz (at elementary mathematics, obviously), the father becomes white as a sheet and puts a hand on the mother’s shoulder to comfort her. Then, when the teacher leaves, he begins to talk to the boy, begging him not to tell anyone about this skill he has, since it will lead to no end of grief, especially when people begin to shout, when they pass him on the street, ‘He is a mathematician!’, a phrase Stewart pronounces with disgust, saying, ‘And we don’t want that, do we?’, ‘No, Sir’, ‘Of course not.’