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A strong message that mathematics revealed in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries is that geometry and space can be the realm of freedom and imagination, abstraction and rigor. An example of this message lies in the infinite variety of forms of mathematical inspiration that the Mexican sculptor Sebastian invented, rediscovered and used throughout all his artistic activity.

The author’s father, Luciano Emmer, was an Italian filmmaker who made feature movies and documentaries on art from the 1930s through 2008, one year before his death. Although the author’s interest in films inspired him to write many books and articles on cinema, he knew he would be a mathematician from a young age. After graduating in 1970 and fortuitously working on minimal surfaces—soap bubbles—he had the idea of making a film. It was the start of a film series on art and mathematics, produced by his father and Italian state television. This article tells of the author’s professional life as a mathematician and a filmmaker.

Leonardo da Vinci probably did not consider the possibility of realizing images with real movement. Many centuries later, however, the author's father, Luciano Emmer, had the idea of reinterpreting the images of the famous artist and scientist using the technique of cinema.

The last few years have seen a revival of interest in the possible connections between mathematics and artistic creativity. The principal motivation for this new interest is the large diffusion of computers with strong graphical capabilities. This diffusion has heightened the roles of intuition and creativity in the aspects of mathematical research connected to the possibility not only of visualizing previously known phenomena but making visible the invisible [1]. Mathematical ideas are not subject to fashion, nor do they vary through the centuries; a theorem proved by Euclid is valid today and will be valid forever. How many other human activities can claim these characteristics of universality and immortality? Is mathematics the espread a plication. Ar ists working berspace, and more specifically bio-telematic systems and oetic structures, can be agents of an evolution. The full flowering of ly interactive art, widely diffused eeply enjoined, may bring about a iety fit for the new millennium.