Alain Goriely and Derek Moulton at Oxford’s Mathematical Institute worked behind the scenes of the latest Sherlock Holmes film helping to formulate a believable mathematical villain in Moriarty.
Initially, the filmmakers approached the mathematicians to ask them to fill Moriarty’s blackboard with equations. Not only did they have to be real, they had to be historically accurate, based on a 19th-century understanding of the field.
“When we did the equations on the blackboard, [the film-makers] got excited,” says Goriely. “Although they were quite secretive about the story, they told us that Moriarty was a mathematics professor and that they wanted us to help them add more meat to the script, which was a little dumb and mostly incorrect.”
Goriely and Moulton ended up going beyond script-tweaking to develop a secret code from scratch that Moriarty uses in the film to send messages around a Europe on the brink of the war he is conniving.
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