On the Russian Science Day, on February 8, Satka held a screening of films about science and technology. The organizer of the educational event is Sobranie Fund in cooperation with the Contemporary Science Film Festival (FANK).

The documentaries were demonstrated in three venues. For example, the Magnezit Museum held the screening of The Sensual Mathematics (see the snapshots). The main characters of the film – the prominent mathematicians Maksim Kontsevich, Jean-Michel Bismut, Cédric Villani, Anatoly Fomenko, Adi Rangan and Günter Ziegler – helped the viewers (in the museum, they happened to be the students of the engineering class of Secondary School No. 40) see the queen of science in an entirely different way. According to the scientists, mathematics isn’t just about numbers and formulas. It is a language used by the world to talk to us. It may be sensual. It also has taste, sound and color; it can be felt (which is proved in the film as it tells us about the scientists’ experiments and passions). For instance, Anatoly Fomenko is using his gift of drawing to put the exciting world of mathematics onto a piece of paper.

’It’s like I’m immersing myself into laws of mathematics and taking pictures of them from the inside,’ he says.

Günter Ziegler pointed out that we are surrounded by geometric shapes everywhere. What interests the scientist is the problem of packaging space into identical shapes. He uses powder balls, sugar cubes, parts of construction toys to demonstrate how they can fill a space.

Jean-Michel Bismut is certain that mathematics is the music of thinking. To him, doing mathematics is a celebration of life in a certain sense. The scientist once found the solution to a complicated problem as he was listening to classical music. He had worked many years on that problem.

The kids were amazed at the fact Adi Rangan was talking about. It turns out that the brain of a fruit-fly has cells that can block a smell. The scientist is convinced that the human brain is capable of that as well. But how? Many of his colleagues are looking for a solution to this problem.

‘An interesting philosophical film. The kids have learned about famous scientists. It helped them understand how close the connection between the world around us and mathematical formulas, equations and shapes really is. I’m sure that none of my students regrets having come here,’ says Lilia Muratova, a mathematics teacher at Secondary School No. 40 and the homeroom teacher of Grade 9 Engineering Class. ‘We’ll come back to the Magnezit Museum more than once in future. We’ve got a number of tours in our plans. The nearest one, a tour of the Satka Magnezit Group Production Site, is scheduled for the end of this month. We are an engineering class, therefore we want the kids to see enterprises operating in real life rather than in some pictures. We took them to see the Chelyabinsk Tube Rolling Plant recently for instance.’

Two more documentaries – The Ideas and Technologies That Change the World and Sixteen Methods to Change the World – were screened the same day in Art-Satka and at the Central Library of the town respectively.

Another science film will be shown on February 12 in Art-Satka at 15:00. This will be the documentary “The Sensual Contact”.