The Mathematician Who Mapped the Geometry of Infinity

Curtis McMullen became a leading geometer by connecting complex dynamics with hyperbolic three-manifolds, Riemann surfaces and Teichmüller theory. After graduating from Williams College, he earned his Harvard doctorate in 1985 under Dennis Sullivan and held positions at MIT, the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and Berkeley. Returning to Harvard in 1997, he received the Fields Medal the following year. This documentary follows the ideas that revealed unexpected unity across geometry and dynamical systems.

McMullen's mathematics begins with simple rules repeated endlessly, yet those iterations generate fractals, chaotic motion and intricate geometric spaces. His achievement was to show that problems in dynamics, topology and hyperbolic geometry often describe the same underlying structures. His visual approach also makes abstract infinity unusually tangible. This documentary explains how different branches of mathematics can converge and why the 1998 Fields Medal recognized both depth and remarkable range.