This post is part of a larger deep dive
Curious about the role of the number pi in Pi? Check out Pi Explained!
Or read the full Pi article!
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Producer: Eric Watson, Scott Vogel
Writer: Darren Aronofsky
Starring: Sean Gullete, Mark Margolis, Ben Shenkman
Year: 1998
Duration: 1h 24m
Country: U.S.A.
Language: English
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If there is a subject I like to see depicted in entertainment and art, it is definitely mathematics.
I love maths – sometimes I spend hours on Khan Academy going through the math courses, and I have now countless books on the subject.
However, this wasn’t love at first sight…
In high-school I wasn’t particularly motivated to study maths, and, if I’m being honest, I kind of sucked at the subject.
I did however have a muse that got me, momentarily, interested in maths.
It wasn’t Rachel Riley, but someone just as interesting: Gyro Gearloose.
That’s true folks, my muse was an anthropomorphic chicken with a silly hat and a tiny robot with a light bulb head as an assistant.
For some reason, I warmed towards this character from Disney, and at some point, I decided I wanted to become an inventor.
Seeing Gyro surrounded by mathematical formulas, I realised I needed to seriously apply myself, and for a moment my grades did improve.
Unfortunately, Gyro wasn’t enough of a motivation to keep up. To my parents’ chagrin, I eventually gave up on the idea of becoming inventor and concentrated my efforts (again, short-term) to become a detective (and guess who my inspiration was?).
I had to wait for a few more years to truly understand the beauty of maths.
I’m no mathematician, but I surely envy their ability to look at nature and think in numbers. Isn’t it awesome that you can converse in a language that is made up of numbers?
Not only that, mathematics is the true language of the universe, in that if we ever encounter aliens, mathematics would certainly be the common language.
Indeed, the mind of a mathematician must really be a fascinating world.
And that brings me to Pi, the movie.
The film stars Sean Gullete as an unemployed mathematician called Max, who appears to suffer from sporadic migraine headaches, paranoia and hallucinations.
Max believes that Mathematics is the language of nature – that is, every natural phenomenon (e.g., a volcano erupting, melting chocolate) can be represented through numbers.
Crucially, Max has convinced himself that there is an implicit pattern in the stock market – a kind of big number that represents the global economy.
He dutifully tries to figure out what that pattern is with the help of his computer, cutely named “Euclid”.
At one time, Euclid prints out a mysterious number, but thinking it had been a malfunction, Max immediately discards it.
Meanwhile, Max is recruited by agents from a Wall Street firm who show interest in his work.
He regularly visits his mentor, Sol Robeson, who had been looking for a pattern in \( \pi \) before a stroke put an end to his research career.
He also encounters a Jewish man, Lenny Meyer, who is doing mathematical research on the Torah and is searching for a pattern consisting of 216 digits long.
Eventually, Max realises that everything is connected via this mysterious 216-digit number, including the Torah and the stock market and Sol’s research on \( \pi \).
The film progresses as Max gradually psychotic episodes intensify, slowly driving him to insanity.
The film was certainly entertaining and I sympathise with the premise that all natural phenomenon can be expressed by mathematical patterns.
I was already familiar with most of the mathematical concepts presented in the film, and appreciated that scientific rigor was not neglected.
Aronovsky appeared to have consulted with mathematicians, and all equations shown in the film are seemingly accurate. He and his team also did extensive research on migraines and on the stock market.
One criticism I have is that although the high-contrast black-and-white reversal film undoubtedly sets the underground feeling that Aronovsky surely intended, I found some scenes visually difficult to discern, which kind of ruined the experience at certain points.
In addition, even though the techno soundtrack really created the adequate vibe, I found that the sound mixing could have been better as I had to resort to subtitles at times to make any sense of the dialogues.
As I mentioned above, I enjoyed the movie and the accuracy with which mathematical concepts were presented. There were a few minor points that I felt could have been improved, but given the limited budget available and unforeseen expense cuts that ensued, the production team is hardly to blame. Here, at Mindlybiz, Pi gets a star rating of 3.5.
Overall, the story line remains relatively easy to follow. However, the film contains a few unexplained and strange events, and the ending is somewhat ambiguous. For that reason, Pi gets a Bizarrometer score of 3.
You don’t need a lot of imagination to figure out that a film called Pi with the number \( \pi \) on the promotional poster has probably something to do with the mathematical constant \( \pi \) (if you don’t know what that is, keep reading below).
But you would be wrong to assume that it is only about this number. The themes incorporated in the film vary far and wide, and this article will only skim through some of them.
At face value, the film appears to promise the ultimate human quest: understanding the essence of everything around us.
Max, the main character of the film, is convinced that everything, including people, exists in a state of disorder. However, within this disorder, there is a pattern, a natural order within it. If you understand that pattern, you understand the meaning, or essence, of whatever thing you are trying to manipulate.
Max’s theory reminds me of the alchemical idea that we explained in a previous article: every substance (be it a rock, an ant, or a human mind) consists of a corrupted (disordered) First Matter that needs to go through several purification stages (brought into a state of order).
The similarities don’t end here. According to alchemists, the First Matter is the same in every substance, only organised differently – similar to Max’s belief that every natural phenomenon can be explained by a mathematical pattern.
In the film, the pattern is hidden within a number consisting of 216 digits, and it represents the one fundamental Truth. You can go as far as to suggest that knowing this pattern will make you omniscient (knowing everything) and perhaps even omnipotent (able to do anything).
For example, as Max states: “Even if we are not sophisticated to be aware of it, there is a pattern, an order, underlying every GO game. Maybe that pattern is like the pattern in the stock market. The Torah. This 216 number.”
This is also suggested by Sol’s research, through which he realised that computers appear to become conscious after spitting out the 216-digit number. In Max’s words: “Studying the pattern made Euclid conscious of itself. It died spitting out the number. Consciousness is the number”.
So, decoding the pattern within this 216-digit number would not only give you the ability to understand nature but also to create life – if you define life as the state of being conscious of course.
But I believe the film alludes to a more sobering reality.
Max’s endeavour to unravel the essence of all things using mathematics turned out catastrophic, slowly driving Max to insanity.
If there were indeed a mathematical pattern underlying all natural phenomena, then it’s likely that we humans would never be able to crack it.
Now, what does this actually have to do with \( \pi \), the number?
As I’ll explain later on, I believe Aronofsky got his inspiration for the storyline from some of the most peculiar properties of the number \( \pi \).
But before we dig into the most meaningful events in the film, let me share with you some interesting facts about the number \( \pi \).
Masterpiece
Hermetic Interpretation
Artistically speaking, the math does not need to make sense. Whatever it is that Max has discovered, people in the world of finance (material world) have noticed his work and are literally following him. And people from the world of religion (spiritual world) have also noticed his work and are following him. The Wall Street folks want to rule the world financially while the religious group admit to wanting to have power as well. The rabbi gives Max the information he needed: what the number is for. The rabbi notes that he and Max have the same last name, “Cohen”, meaning “priest”. But Max’s first name is “Max”, which means “high”. Max is the High Priest, the only one who can be trusted with the Holy Name of God, which it is his responsibility to utter in the Holy of Holies, just once, in ORDER to move history along to the time of the Messiah’s coming. Max is not blubbering random numbers as he destroys his computer, but the Name of God. Max accomplished this high and holy task, but humbly, with no thought of reward for himself, other than the freedom to live an ordinary life, which he wins by, as you said, “destroying the evidence”, including the evidence inside his own head, which they could torture him for, but he tortures himself first and destroys the part of his brain that appears to be the source of all the commotion. Great movie. Max is a hero, not a psycho. You all get it wrong.
You could also use some writing classes. Your grammar needs some work.
Hi Natasha,
Thank you for your comment.
Actually, I mostly agree with your interpretation. If my analysis somehow came out as suggesting that Max was a “psycho”, that was unintentional. The “insanity” I attributed to Max was described in the context of Max’s realisation of some fundamental truth (be that the true name of God, the source of all consciousness, the mathematical pattern governing every natural phenonmenon, or something else) that was presumably too much for a human mind to handle, no matter how mathematically- or spiritually-trained one would be.
Aronofsky was proposefully ambiguous (as he always is with his films) regarding Max’s discovery at the end, but he left subtle clues throughout the movie (such as the title in the journal where Max writes down the number: “Only God is Perfect”). One important clue was in the audio commentary by Aronofsky himself, where he mentioned he wanted the actor portraying Max to appear naked while reciting the numbers close to the end of the film. To me, it clearly suggests there is something transcendental about Max’s state of mind at that point, which is the reason I’m also leaning towards the idea that Max was a genius, not a psycho.
Wow, what an incredibly well-written article. Most compelling movie deep dive (and then some) I’ve read in a long time.
Hi birdobserver,
Many thanks for your comment, and I’m very happy you enjoyed the article!
👏
Thank you! I’m glad you liked the article! 🙂
You’re amazing, keep up the brilliant work