Pi (film)

π
File:Pi DVD.jpg
Directed by	Darren Aronofsky
Written by	Story: Darren Aronofsky Sean Gullette Eric Watson Screenplay: Darren Aronofsky
Produced by	Eric Watson
Starring	Sean Gullette
Distributed by	Artisan Entertainment
Release dates	July 10, 1998
Running time	84 min.
Language	English
Budget	$60,000

π (or Pi: Faith in Chaos) is a 1998 American psychological thriller directed by Darren Aronofsky. The title refers to the mathematical constant π (pronounced [paɪ]).

Production

π was filmed on black-and-white reversal film and directed by Darren Aronofsky.

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. Eventually Max escapes his torment by destroying his research and then drilling into his own head. The film ends with him losing his mathematical abillities, and now when he looks at the sky, he sees it only for what it is.

Cast

Actor	Role
Sean Gullette	Maximillian Cohen
Mark Margolis	Sol Robeson
Ben Shenkman	Lenny Meyer
Pamela Hart	Marcy Dawson
Stephen Pearlman	Rabbi Cohen
Samia Shoaib	Devi
Ajay Naidu	Farroukh
Kristyn Mae-Anne Lao	Jenna
Espher Lao Nieves	Jenna's Mom

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 [1][2] or the Divided Name. It comes from 14:19-21. Each of these three verses is composed of seventy-two letters in the original Hebrew. If you write the three verses one above the other, the first from right to left, the second from left to right, and the third from right to left, you get seventy-two columns of three-letter names of God. The seventy-two names are divided into four columns of eighteen names each. Each of the four columns represents one of the four letters of the Tetragrammaton.

The actual name of God, according to Jewish traditions, is the Tetragrammaton (YHWH or YHVH). 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, in the case of the Tetragrammaton, when vowels were used, the actual vowels were replaced with the vowels of the word Adonai to avoid pronouncing the Tetragrammaton, which is a taboo in Judaism.

In addition, 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.

Soundtrack

π launched the film scoring career of Clint Mansell.

1. "πr²" (Clint Mansell)
2. "P.E.T.R.O.L." (Orbital)
3. "Kalpol Intro" (Autechre)
4. "Bucephalus Bouncing Ball" (Aphex Twin)
5. "Watching Windows [Ed Rush & Optical Remix]" (Roni Size)
6. "Angel" (Massive Attack)
7. "We Got the Gun" (Clint Mansell)
8. "No Man's Land" (David Holmes)
9. "Anthem" (Gus Gus)
10. "Drippy" (Banco de Gaia)
11. "Third from the Sun" (Psilonaut)
12. "Low Frequency Inversion Field" (Spacetime Continuum)
13. "2πr" (Clint Mansell)

Trivia

• Sol's pet fish are named for famed mathematicians throughout history - one is named Archimedes, and another is named Pythagoras.
• Max's final treatment for his migraines is somewhat akin to the ancient technique of trepanation, however his take hardly involves the skull.
• Max's inability to do computations in the movie's final scene suggests he is suffering from dyscalculia, a primary symptom of Gerstmann syndrome. While Gerstmann syndrome is indeed usually associated with lesions to the regions of the parietal lobe directly above the ear, the damage is usually to the region in the dominant hemisphere, which for Max, who is right handed, should have been his left.

See also

• π (the mathematical constant)

External links

• Pi at IMDb
• Pi - Official website