Simons Institute Lower Bounds Documentary Featured on Labocine

The Simons Institute’s 2022 short documentary, Until the Sun Engulfs the Earth: Lower Bounds in Computational Complexity, is being featured this month in Labocine’s April 2026 issue, mathēmatiká.

An online magazine and streaming platform that is home to the Science New Wave, Labocine describes its April issue this way: “Across civilizations and centuries, mathematics has shaped how we understand the universe — and how we see. This issue explores cinema through numbers, patterns, algorithms, and abstraction: films where geometry becomes choreography, probability becomes narrative, and equations dissolve into image and sound. From rational structures to irrational dreams, mathēmatiká traces the hidden logic of moving images, revealing cinema itself as a system of rhythms, symmetries, and infinite possibilities.”

Originally released on YouTube in 2022 as Episode 2 of the Simons Institute’s web series Theory Shorts, Until the Sun Engulfs the Earth opened that year’s Film Festival Mathematics – Computer Science, hosted by the Heidelberg Laureate Forum. The documentary asks how we know that a problem is impossible to solve. In the film, some of the world’s leading researchers and rising stars in the field of computational complexity play a memory game, find their way out of a maze, and explore an imagined landscape, as they make sense of the mathematics of proving the hardness of problems.

The film was co-directed by Anil Ananthaswamy (the Simons Institute’s science communicator at large) and Kristin Kane (the Simons Institute’s communications director), and germinated in Fall 2018 during the research program on Lower Bounds in Computational Complexity. The film features a number of participants in that program: Paul Beame (University of Washington), Faith Ellen (University of Toronto), Jelani Nelson (UC Berkeley), Manuel Sabin (UC Berkeley), and Madhu Sudan (Harvard).