Science Unveiled: Must-See Movies About Scientists

Based on the real life story of legendary cryptanalyst Alan Turing, the film portrays the nail-biting race against time by Turing and his brilliant team of code-breakers at Britain's top-secret Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, during the darkest days of World War II.

The adventures of a group of explorers who make use of a newly discovered wormhole to surpass the limitations on human space travel and conquer the vast distances involved in an interstellar voyage.

During a manned mission to Mars, Astronaut Mark Watney is presumed dead after a fierce storm and left behind by his crew. But Watney has survived and finds himself stranded and alone on the hostile planet. With only meager supplies, he must draw upon his ingenuity, wit and spirit to subsist and find a way to signal to Earth that he is alive.

A biopic of Temple Grandin, an autistic woman who has become one of top scientists in humane livestock handling.

John Nash is a brilliant but asocial mathematician fighting schizophrenia. After he accepts secret work in cryptography, his life takes a turn for the nightmarish.

A radio astronomer receives the first extraterrestrial radio signal ever picked up on Earth. As the world powers scramble to decipher the message and decide upon a course of action, she must make some difficult decisions between her beliefs, the truth, and reality.

Taking place after alien crafts land around the world, an expert linguist is recruited by the military to determine whether they come in peace or are a threat.

The untold story of Katherine G. Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan and Mary Jackson – brilliant African-American women working at NASA and serving as the brains behind one of the greatest operations in history – the launch of astronaut John Glenn into orbit. The visionary trio crossed all gender and race lines to inspire generations to dream big.

Over 100 years ago, Albert Einstein grappled with the implications of his revolutionary special theory of relativity and came to a startling conclusion: mass and energy are one, related by the formula E = mc2. In "Einstein's Big Idea," NOVA dramatizes the remarkable story behind this equation. E = mc2 was just one of several extraordinary breakthroughs that Einstein made in 1905, including the completion of his special theory of relativity, his identification of proof that atoms exist, and his explanation of the nature of light, which would win him the Nobel Prize in Physics. Among Einstein's ideas, E = mc2 is by far the most famous. Yet how many people know what it really means? In a thought-provoking and engrossing docudrama, NOVA illuminates this deceptively simple formula by unraveling the story of how it came to be.

Humanity finds a mysterious object buried beneath the lunar surface and sets off to find its origins with the help of HAL 9000, the world's most advanced super computer.

The Theory of Everything is the extraordinary story of one of the world’s greatest living minds, the renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who falls deeply in love with fellow Cambridge student Jane Wilde.

Schoolteacher Bertram Cates is arrested for teaching his students Darwin's theory of evolution. The case receives national attention and one of the newspaper reporters, E.K. Hornbeck, arranges to bring in renowned defense attorney and atheist Henry Drummond to defend Cates. The prosecutor, Matthew Brady is a former presidential candidate, famous evangelist, and old adversary of Drummond.

A historical drama set in Roman Egypt, concerning philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria and her relationship with her slave Davus, who is torn between his love for her and the possibility of gaining his freedom by joining the rising tide of Christianity.

Poor physics student Marie is studying at the Sorbonne in 1890s Paris. One of the few women studying in her field, Marie encounters skepticism concerning her abilities, but is eventually offered a research placement in Pierre Curie's lab. The scientists soon fall in love and embark on a shared quest to extract, from a particular type of rock, a new chemical element they have named radium. However, their research puts them on the brink of professional failure.

A true story about Louis Pasteur, who revolutionized medicine by proving that much disease is caused by microbes, that sanitation is paramount and that at least some diseases can be cured by vaccinations.

The story of Dian Fossey, a scientist who came to Africa to study the vanishing mountain gorillas, and later fought to protect them.

A scientific researcher, sent on a government study: The Lupus Project, must investigate the possible "menace" of wolves in the north. To do so, he must survive in the wilderness for six months on his own. In the course of these events, he learns about the true beneficial and positive nature of the wolf species. Based on the book and true story by Farley Mowat.