Taha's Theorem Seeking financial support for a Film by aaron Dye

Taha Muhammad is an 80-year-old Kurdish-American refugee who claims to have solved one of the world's hardest math problems.

Taha's Theorem is a documentary that will profile Taha's life and work as a mathematician, landscape painter, prolific author, and father of five. Since escaping Saddam Hussein’s brutal crackdown on the Kurdish ethnic group in Iraq in the early 1990s, Taha and his family have lived in the U.S. where he has worked as a middle school math teacher and occasional translator for the U.S. military.

The drive, determination, and daring necessary to escape Hussein’s Ba’athist forces and survive persecution and internment in Turkey – all while keeping his family together – have continued to define Taha’s life in the U.S. Now living in a suburb of Minneapolis, he continues to strive for a better life, recognition in his work, and the cementing of a scientific and artistic legacy.

Taha’s goal to prove that he has solved the “Collatz Conjecture” is something he hopes will not only bring him award money, but will finally garner him recognition as a brilliant math mind. Even at his age, Taha has not given up and sends daily letters to mathematic institutions and uploads messages to Youtube, Twitter, and Facebook reiterating his claims.

Several of Taha's self-published books available on Amazon.com

I discovered Taha and his story through a blog on the Kurdish Project website while researching for a cultural documentary on Kurdish people and history.

Upon reading his book We Survived Iraq and Turkey: Long Road to Freedom, I knew his story had to be told through film. In 1981, Taha's eldest son, Lukman, was killed by a member of Saddam Hussein's political party who was soon released with a slap on the wrist. It was then that Taha knew he had to find a way to covertly transport himself, his wife Malika, and their four surviving sons from the Iraqi city of Kirkuk to the Turkish border.

After years of failed attempts to leave, Taha paid a smuggler to transport the family through dangerous security checkpoints, on the road to Turkey.

There, they faced intense uncertainty and persecution by Turkish authorities and experienced months on the road, living in safe-houses, and periodic internment.

They eventually made it to a U.S. military camp near a city called Zakho on the Iraqi-Turkish border. There, they worked with American forces to help build a refugee camp and served as translators for the soldiers.

Thanks in part to the work of U.S. General James Jones, the family secured asylum and transport to the United States and arrived in Minot, North Dakota in September, 1991.

Taha (center-right) and his Minneapolis-based family on the first weekend of filming.

Today, Taha is retired from teaching math and spends his time with family and trying to prove that he has solved the Collatz Conjecture.

The Collatz Conjecture is a famous problem that states that the repetition of two simple operations will reduce every natural number eventually down to one. While deceptively straightforward, the problem has captivated mathematicians for decades.

With a Japanese company offering millions of dollars to anyone who can prove that they've solved the Collatz Conjecture, Taha is striving now, more than ever, to show the world that despite being excluded from institutional math organizations his whole career, he has a simple, beautiful, and accurate answer to the elusive problem.

The film has already completed several days of production, but at least four more days of shooting are necessary to capture Taha's entire story. Videography will be completed no later than May 2024, with the goal of sending the film to festivals throughout the 2024-25 winter deadline season.

In order to complete the film, a budget of $4000 is required to pay for further trips from Washington, D.C. to Minneapolis, film festival fees, camera-operator rates, and other production expenses.

The distribution strategy of this film is to send it to Minnesota-based film festivals, documentary film festivals, international Kurdish film festivals, as well as math and media education conferences, before opening up distribution to a web campaign.

The film is ultimately an exploration of grief and the seemingly inexplicable yet incredibly human ways that grief is dealt with through art, hobbyism, and the pursuit of wild dreams.

Any and all financial support is greatly appreciated in this endeavor to bring Taha's story to the screen. Depending on funding commitment, funders may be listed as Executive Producers in the film's credits and thanked at the beginning and/or end of the film's runtime.

Taha's Theorem is a production of Cold Outpost Films, directed and produced by Aaron Dye. Inquiries regarding the film and support may be sent to aaronfdye@gmail.com.

Aaron Dye is a filmmaker and media educator with an MFA in Documentary Production and Studies from the University of North Texas and a bachelor's degree in Film Production from Emerson College.

He currently serves as the Multimedia Editor of the publication, Planet Forward, a project of George Washington University.