London Mathematical Society Newsletter, September 2010 Review of the film

Rites of Love and Math is a 26-minute colour film which is a homage to the 26-minute 1966 black and white film Rites of Love and Death. The original film was directed by Yukio Mishima, who also starred as a young Japanese army officer. The officer would rather die than execute his friends, who were involved in the failed coup d’état of 1936. He spends his last night making love to his wife, after which he commits harakiri. The original film is of great intensity, with the stylized Noh theatricality heightened by the soundtrack of Tristan and Isolde. In addition, we know that in 1970 Mishima himself participated in a failed coup d’état and committed harakiri. Edward Frenkel, the co-director of Rites of Love and Math, is a distin-guished mathematical physicist at Berkeley. In the film he plays the mathe-matician who discovers after many years of hard work a Formula of Love so powerful that it can be used for both good and evil.The formula is credibly played by equation (5.7) in Frenkel, Losev and Nekrasov [2]. The Forces of Evil want to steal the formula. The mathematician spends his last nigh