Movies - Pi

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	Movies - Pi

π (or Pi) is a 1998 American film directed by Darren Aronofsky. The title refers to the mathematical constant π (pronounced pie).

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 a 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. It has also proven to be a steady seller on DVD.

Darren Aronofsky's next film was Requiem for a Dream
(which was also sold co-packaged with π).

Aronofsky raised money for the project by selling $100 shares in the film to family and friends, and was able to pay them all back with a $50 profit per-share when the film was sold to Artisan.

Plot

The film is about a mathematical prodigy, Maximillian Cohen, who believes that everything in nature can be understood through numbers. Utilizing the stock market as his data set, Max tries to uncover patterns with the assistance of his homemade supercomputer Euclid. Max is plagued with migraine headaches that cause him to periodically black out. He also suffers from extreme paranoia and some form of social anxiety disorder. 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 (or depending on your interpretation, that his paranoid delusions have manifested themselves in visual and auditory hallucinations). A number of mysterious people become interested in his research, including a woman from a Wall Street firm with access to powerful new computer hardware, and a group of kabbalistic Jews (from a Hasidic sect) who believe that the Torah, when represented as numbers instead of letters, contains the true name of God, an example of a Bible code.

The game of Go

In the film, Max periodically plays a game called Go with his mentor. This game, now very popular particularly among mathematicians, features a very simple set of rules that results in an extremely complex game strategy.

Mathematics and π explain the ratio problem (?)

While the film's characters make several mathematical "goofs", such as saying

* the ratio of a/b is the same as the ratio of a/(a + b) instead of (a+b)/a,

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 film, 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.

Kabbalah and π

The 216-letter name of God sought by the characters of the film is actually widely known and called the Schemhamphoras or the Divided Name. It comes from by this algorithm: The 216 Letter Name of God is the composition of three verses of 72 letters each in Exodus. The Name composes into 72 triplets by taking the first letter of the first verse, the last letter of the second verse, and the first letter of third verse. The next triplet consists of the second letter of the first verse, the second to last letter of the second verse and the second letter of the third verse. We proceed this way until we form all 72 triplets. The actual name of God, according to Jewish traditions, is YHVH sometimes mistaken as YHWH, although Hebrew does not contain the letter or sound "W." Because the word was sacred, the letters were punctuated with the vowel sounds for the substitute word Adonai as a reminder. This is the name that was intoned in the temple once a year during Yom Kippur, as referenced in the film. What has been lost is not the spelling of the name, as in the film, but the true pronunciation, since words written in Hebrew in the Torah do not include vowels. Furthermore, it would be highly unlikely that the Hebrew Schemhamphoras would translate into 216 digits in a decimal system. There is no zero in Hebrew numerals and the system does not work as a normal decimal system.

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