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'''π''' (also known as '''Pi''' or '''Pi - Faith in Chaos''') is a 1998 American psychological thriller directed by Darren Aronofsky. The title refers to the mathematical constant π (Pi).

Contents

Plot

Cast

Production

The game of Go

Mathematics and ''π''

Kabbalah and ''π''

Soundtrack

See also

References

External links

Plot

The film is about a mathematical genius, Maximillian Cohen, who narrates much of the movie. Max, a number theorist, theorizes that everything in nature can be understood through numbers, and that if you graph the numbers properly patterns will emerge. He is working on finding patterns within the stock market, using its billions upon billions of variables as his data set with the assistance of his homemade supercomputer, Euclid.
The film opens with Max narrating a time when he was very young and tried to stare directly at the sun, despite his mother's warnings not to. His eyes were terribly damaged, and his doctors were not sure if they would ever heal. They did, but immediately thereafter he began to be plagued with headaches. The headaches are severe enough to drive him to the brink of madness, and he often passes out from the pain. He also suffers from extreme paranoia, manifested in menacing hallucinations, and some form of social anxiety disorder. Throughout the film, it gets increasingly difficult to separate what is real and what is a product of Max's hallucinations.
In the course of his work, Max begins making stock predictions based on Euclid's calculations. In the middle of printing out the picks, Euclid suddenly crashes, but first spits out a 216-digit number that appears to be nothing more than a random string. Disgusted, Max tosses out the printout of the number. The next morning, Max checks the financial pages and sees that the few picks Euclid made before crashing were accurate. He searches desperately for the printout but cannot find it.
The only social interaction Max seems to have is with Sol Robeson, his old mathematics mentor, who had regarded Max as his prize student. Sol had been a leading figure in research into the nature of Pi in his earlier years, but gave it up for reasons that are not yet clear. He sympathizes with Max about the loss of Euclid but becomes unnerved when Max mentions the string of numbers, asking if the string was 216 digits long. When Max questions him about the string, Sol indicates that he came across such a number many years ago. He urges Max to slow down and try taking a break.
At a coffee shop, Max meets Lenny Meyer, a Hasidic Jew who does mathematical research on the Torah. Lenny demonstrates some simple Gematria to Max and explains how some people believe that the Torah is a string of numbers that form a code sent by God. Max takes an interest when he realizes that some of the number concepts Lenny discusses are similar to real mathematical theories, such as the Fibonacci Sequence. Lenny also mentions that he and his fellow researchers are searching for a 216-digit number that is repeated throughout the text of the Torah.
Max is also being pursued by agents of a Wall Street firm, who are interested in his work for financial reasons. One of the agents, Marcy Dawson, offers Max a powerful new computer chip in exchange for the results of his work. Max insists that he is uninterested in profit but takes the chip to help his new research into the Torah.
Utilizing the sophisticated chip, Max has Euclid analyze mathematical patterns in the Torah. Euclid crashes again, but once again spits out the 216-digit number. Thereafter, Max appears to become somewhat clairvoyant and able to visualize the stock-market patterns he had been searching for. His headaches also increase in intensity, and he discovers a strange vein-like bulge protruding from his right temple.
During a visit with Sol, his old mentor warns him that the mysterious 216-digit number is more than Max realizes, and seems to have powers of its own. Sol insists that trying to understand it years ago had caused him to suffer a stroke, but Max angrily dismisses Sol's concerns as cowardice.
Marcy Dawson and her henchmen grab Max on the street, threatening him with a gun. They had been using some of Max's formulas to try to make predictions of their own, but their limited understanding of the information has caused them to unwittingly crash the stock market. Lenny and his fellow Hasidim rescue Max, but soon make similar demands on Max to give them the number. They believe the number was meant for them to bring about the Messianic Age. Max refuses, insisting that whatever the source of the number, it has been revealed to him alone.
Driven to the brink of madness, Max experiences another headache and resists the urge to take his pain medication. Believing that the number and the headaches are linked, Max tries to concentrate on the number through the pain. After passing out, Max has a vision of himself standing in a white void and repeating the digits of the number. Max's neighbors discover him unconscious and revive him, breaking his vision. Giving up, Max trepans himself in the right temple, where he believes his mathematical genius is located. Whether this actually occurs is left ambiguous. Later, Max sits on a park bench and reveals that he is no longer able to perform complex mental calculation. He observes the trees blowing in the breeze, at peace.

Cast

★ 'Sean Gullette' as 'Maximillian Cohen', a reclusive math genius

★ 'Mark Margolis' as 'Sol Robeson', Max's mentor, who abandoned his research into π after it nearly killed him.

★ 'Ben Shenkman' as 'Lenny Meyer', a Hasidic Jew who introduces Max to Kaballah.

★ 'Pamela Hart' as 'Marcy Dawson', a representative of an investment firm that is interested in Max's research

★ 'Stephen Pearlman' as 'Rabbi Cohen', the leader of a Jewish sect that pursues Max.

★ 'Samia Shoaib' as 'Devi', Max's attractive and friendly neighbor.

★ 'Ajay Naidu' as 'Farroukh', Devi's boyfriend.

★ 'Kristyn Mae-Anne Lao' as 'Jenna', a girl who plays math games with Max.

Production

''π'' was written and directed by Darren Aronofsky, and filmed on high-contrast black-and-white reversal film.
''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.
According to the DVD's production notes, 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. He paid his crew in deferred payments amounting to $200 a day, as well as 'shares' in the film. Darren Aronofsky's next film was ''Requiem for a Dream'' (which was also sold co-packaged with ''π'').

The game of Go

In the film, Max periodically plays Go with his mentor. This game has historically stimulated the study of mathematics^[1] and features a simple set of rules that results in a complex game strategy. The two characters each use the game as a model for their view of the universe; Sol says that the game is a microcosm of an infinitely complex and chaotic world with Max asserting that patterns can be found in the complexity of its variations. Actors Sean Gulette and Mark Margolis both learned the game for the film from the New York City American Go Association club.

Mathematics and ''π''

The film's characters make several mathematical goofs, such as

★ The film shows a drawing of the golden rectangle (with larger side length 'a' and shorter side length 'b') with . This equation has no solution for non-zero ''a'', and the golden ratio actually refers to a ratio such that .

★ The Greek letter $heta,$ (theta) is stated to be the symbol for the golden ratio. In fact, the letter used is generally (phi).

★ In the same scene as the previous goof, while discussing the links between the Fibonacci sequence and the golden ratio, Max states, "If you divide a hundred and forty-four into two hundred and thirty-three, it approaches theta." What he means is that the ratio between terms of the Fibonacci sequence and their immediate predecessors approaches the golden ratio as one looks further along the sequence. The single division 144/233 has a fixed value, so it does not ''approach'' any other value.
Max pursues a legitimate scientific goal, and 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 that 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. 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 Shemhamphorash or the Divided Name. It comes from Exodus 14:19-21. Each of these three verses is composed of seventy-two letters in the original Hebrew. If one writes 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, one gets 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 for several reasons:

★ There is no zero in Hebrew numerals.

★ The Hebrew number system does not work as a normal decimal system; the characters of the Hebrew Alphabet, the Aleph-Bet, correspond to the following values: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100, 200, 300, and 400. So, if the letter "A" had a value of 1, and "B" 2, and so on, you would only get up until "I" (which would have a value of 9) until you would need multiple letters to reflect numbers that are not divisible by ten and that have two or more digits (i.e., if "J" was 10, and you wanted to make the number 11, it would be "JA", or 10+1). If each single-digit number corresponded to its letter only, then you would have a 216-letter word that only uses letters A through I.

Soundtrack

Main articles: π (film score)

''π'' launched the film scoring career of Clint Mansell.

See also

★ Pi (the mathematical constant)

References

1. http://www.msoworld.com/mindzine/news/orient/go/special/gomath.html

External links

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★ Pi - Official website