Pi (movie) Details, Meaning Pi (movie) Article and Explanation Guide

Pi (movie) Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description

π (pronounced, and often written as, Pi) is a 1998 American science fiction film directed by Darren Aronofsky.

Table of contents

1 Production
2 Plot Synopsis
3 Mathematics and Pi
4 Soundtrack
5 Quotes
6 Technical Data
7 See also
8 External link

Production

π was filmed on black-and-white reversal film and stars Sean Gullette, Mark Margolis, Ben Shenkman, Pamela Hart, Stephen Pearlman, and Samia Shoaib.

π had an extremely low budget ($60,000), but proved a financial success at the box office ($3.2 million gross in the U.S.) despite only a limited release to theaters. Darren Aronofsky made the movie Requiem for a Dream after π.

Plot Synopsis

The film is about a theoretical mathematician, Maximillian Cohen, who believes that through mathematics everything in nature can be understood through numbers. Utilizing the stock market as his data set, Max tries to uncover patterns in the stock market with the assistance of his computer Euclid. Max is plagued with migraine headaches that cause him to periodically blackout. He also suffers from extreme paranoia. As the movie progresses, he begins to believe that he has found the key to understanding the universe, but as he closes in on the answer, it turns out that his paranoia is justified. A number of mysterious people become interested in his research, including a Go-playing mathematician who seems his mentor (but always seems to be holding back information from him), a woman from a Wall Street firm with access to powerful new computer hardware, and a group of kabbalistic Jews who believe that the Torah, when represented as numbers instead of letters, contains the true name of God, an example of a bible code.

Mathematics and Pi

While the film's characters make several mathematical "goofs", such as claiming that the kabbalists could recite the phonetic equivalents of all 216-digit numbers in only two thousand years, it is notable that Sean Gullette's character, Max, pursues a legitimate scientific goal (though through questionable "scientific" means). As such, π features several references to mathematics and mathematical theories. For instance, Max finds the golden spiral occurring everywhere including the stock market. Max's belief that diverse systems embodying highly nonlinear dynamics share a unifying pattern bears much similarity to results in chaos theory, which provides machinery for describing certain phenomena of nonlinear systems, which might be thought of as patterns. Note that unlike in the movie, chaos theory does not allow one to predict the exact behavior of a chaotic system like the stock market, and in fact provides compelling evidence that such predictions are in principle impossible.