Geniuses in films can be pretty annoying. They’re often asocial, smug and prone to zoning out to soundtracks of soaring classical music, as they solve complicated mathematical problems that the rest of us could never hope to understand.

Given Benedict Cumberbatch’s turn as codebreaking mathematician Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, out this weekend in the UK, we’ve set our reservations aside and picked five on-screen aha moments. Which films you would add to the list?

A Beautiful Mind

Russell Crowe shed his gruff, bad-boy image for this 2001 role as soft-spoken Nobel laureate John Nash. Before spiralling into a battle with paranoid schizophrenia and enduring experimental shock therapy treatments for his illness, Nash flourished at Princeton university. In this scene, he landed upon his Nash equilibrium theory, in the rather unlikely setting of a bar meat market.

Good Will Hunting

Matt Damon played a janitor by day and “mystery math magician” by night in the critically acclaimed film he co-wrote with buddy Ben Affleck. While this scene doesn’t fully explode into the usual trope of illuminated numbers flashing across the genius’s line of sight, there’s a nice ratio of string-section tension-building to frenzied blackboard scribbling.

Little Man Tate

Jodie Foster’s directorial debut slipped into slightly hamfisted genius territory, in this 1991 tale of a prodigal schoolboy living in a world that just doesn’t get him. But it’s hard to be snarky about an adorable protagonist who was only seven years old, so we’ve included this display of character Fred Tate’s ridiculous computation skills.

Proof

Jake Gyllenhaal starred opposite Gwyneth Paltrow and Anthony Hopkins in this story about a once-lauded mathematician’s crumbling sanity – and the daughter who’s lived in his shadow for her entire life. But look! There’s a room in their family home full of notebooks with gibberish scrawled in them. And one of them contains a proof that might change the world. Eureka, indeed.

Back to the Future Part II

Dr Emmett Brown, played by Christopher Lloyd, fully embodied his mad scientist role in the Back to the Future franchise. It’s likely he experienced enough jolting epiphanies to fill this entire list alone, but this one in particular beautifully caught the film’s balance between absurd humour and life-or-death breathlessness. Surely we wouldn’t want the future of the world, time travel and all, in anyone else’s capable hands but his?