Art critic Matt Collings admits he finds higher mathematics baffling, then sets out to understand why physicists and mathematicians call certain equations beautiful. He visits the people who work with them daily, tracing a line from Newton's laws of motion through Einstein's E=mc2 to Paul Dirac's equation predicting antimatter and the more contested elegance of string theory. Physicists explain what they mean when they call an equation beautiful, pointing to symmetry, compression, and the strange fact that a few symbols on a page can predict results decades before anyone can test them. Collings plays the skeptical outsider throughout, pushing back when the language of beauty starts to sound like mysticism, and asking whether equations are discovered features of reality or human inventions that happen to work. The film uses interviews with working scientists rather than reenactment, keeping the focus on the equations themselves and on the argument over what, if anything, makes some of them more beautiful than others.