Pi (film)

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The correct title of this article is π (film). The initial letter is shown capitalized due to technical restrictions.

π

Directed by	Darren Aronofsky
Produced by	Eric Watson
Written by	Story: Darren Aronofsky Sean Gullette Eric Watson Screenplay: Darren Aronofsky
Starring	Sean Gullette
Distributed by	Artisan Entertainment
Release date(s)	July 10, 1998
Running time	84 min.
Language	English
Budget	$60,000
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

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

1 Production
2 Plot
3 Cast
4 The game of Go
5 Mathematics and π explain the ratio problem (?)
6 Kabbalah and π
7 Soundtrack
8 Trivia
9 See also
10 External links

[edit] Production

Pi was written and directed by Darren Aronofsky, and filmed on high-contrast black-and-white reversal film.

Pi 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.

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

[edit] Plot

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

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 has been plagued with recurring and extremely debilitating headaches since age 6, headaches that respond very little to any medical treatment. Max suspects the origin of the headaches to be related to an accident when he was 6 years old, in which he stared into the sun at such length that "the doctors didn't know if [his] eyes would ever heal." The day that his eyes had healed, Max experienced his first headache (and it is implied that this incident may have caused some sort of trauma, resulting in his mathematical genius). 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 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, then trepanning himself with an electric drill. The last scene of the film shows Max displaying a lack of interest in mathematics, and now when he looks at the sky, he sees it only for what it is.

[edit] 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

[edit] The game of Go

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

[edit] Mathematics and π explain the ratio problem (?)

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

The Golden Ratio defines a ratio such that a/b is the same as a/(a+b). Actually, the golden ratio refers to a ratio such that a/b = (a+b)/a.

Sean Gullette's character, Max, pursues a legitimate scientific goal (though 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. 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.

[edit] 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 Exodus 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.

[edit] Soundtrack

π launched the film scoring career of Clint Mansell.

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

[edit] Trivia

One of Sol's pet fish is named for the famed mathematician, Archimedes. The other is named Icarus - the character from Greek mythology who flew too close to the sun - a fact which is in line with Max's disability, as well as with Sol's name, which refers to the sun (sol being the root of words such as solar). Furthermore, Icarus' foolhardy attempt to achieve the impossible could be considered analogous to Max's own aspirations.
Max's mysterious headaches are explained pseudo-religiously towards the end of the film, but could also be explained in more medical terms as an extreme case of Trigeminal Autonomic Cephalgias. Cluster headache, a form of Trigeminal Autonomic Cephalgias, is often considered the worst pain known to medical science today, the severity of the pain cited by patients to be even worse than unmedicated amputation of a limb. Cluster headache is notoriously difficult to treat.
The Richard Ashcroft song "God In The Numbers" from "Human Conditions" was inspired by the film.