"An evil mastermind is set on bringing about global war. Only one man can stop him: Sherlock Holmes, with the help of his partner in crime-solving Dr Watson. But in the latest Holmes flick, Sherlock Holmes: A game of shadows, they don’t just need their trusty revolvers and Holmes’s trademark prescient fight scenes, they also need to grasp some mathematics.
The villain is Holmes’s nemesis, James Moriarty, a professor of mathematics and all-around evil genius. In the book The Final Problem, he is described by Holmes himself as “a genius, a philosopher, an abstract thinker. He has a brain of the first order.”
But behind the wit of the character in the film lies the mathematical know-how of a team at the University of Oxford. Alain Goriely and Derek Moulton at Oxford’s Mathematical Institute have been hard at work behind the scenes helping to formulate a believable mathematical villain.
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."
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