The Sporting Life: Oppenheimer Edition

Dr. J. Ernest Wilkins Jr., who received a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago as a 19-year-old in 1942, was honored by the University at a special event.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer is an IMAX®-shot epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it. Oppenheimer is filmed in a combination of IMAX® 65mm and 65mm large-format film photography including, for the first time ever, sections in IMAX® black and white analogue photography.

You should take advantage of the unique opp-ortunity to see it as Nolan intended it to be seen, now at one of only 23 theaters worldwide with the capability to display the phenomenal full frame IMAX FILM version of the movie. The actual film itself is 11 MILES LONG and weighs 600 POUNDS!

The film has one of the greatest casts of all time: Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, Emily Blunt as “Kitty” Oppenheimer, Matt Damon as Leslie Groves, Robert Downey, Jr., Florence Pugh, Benny Safdie, Josh Hartnett, Kenneth Branagh, Tony Goldwyn, Rami Malek, Jack Quaid, David Krumholtz, James Remar, Gustaf Skarsgård David Dastmalchian, Harry Groener, Emma Dumont, Alden Ehrenreich, Matthew Modine, James D’Arcy, Scott Grimes, among others. Music by Ludwig Göransson (Black Panther) and the director of photography is Hoyte Van Hoytema.   

Ronald Auguste

Ronald Auguste plays J. Ernest Wilkins in the film. Jesse Ernest Wilkins Jr. (November 27, 1923 – May 1, 2011) was an African American nuclear scientist, mechanical engineer, and mathematician. A child prodigy, he attended the University of Chicago at the age of 13, becoming its youngest-ever student. His graduation at a young age resulted in him being hailed as “the Negro Genius” in the national media. Wilkins was one of the African American scientists and technicians on the Manhattan Project during the Second World War.

In 1940, Wilkins completed his AB in mathematics at the University of Chicago. He went on to an MS and PhD in mathematics at the same institution, which he completed in 1941 and 1942. Wilkins taught mathematics from 1943 to 1944 at the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). In 1944 he returned to the University of Chicago where he served first as an associate mathematical physicist and then as a physicist in its Metallurgical Laboratory, as part of the Manhattan Project.

Working under the direction of Arthur Holly Compton and Enrico Fermi, Wilkins researched the extraction of fissionable nuclear materials but was not told of the research group’s ultimate goal until after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Wilkins was the co-discoverer or discoverer of a number of phenomena in physics such as the Wilkins effect and the Wigner–Wilkins spectra. When Wilkins’s team was transferred to Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, due to the Jim Crow laws of the Southern United States, Wilkins was prevented from working there.

Dr. J. Ernest Wilkins, Jr. pledged the Iota Chapter of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity in 1938, and served as the Fraternity’s Grand Keeper of Records & Exchequer; his father, J. Ernest Wilkins, Sr. served as the Fraternity’s 13th Grand Polemarch.

(Universal Pictures’ Youtube page)

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