Pi: Faith In Chaos: The Best Indie Film Ever

1 - I can do better 2 - Jury's out 3 - Pretty darn good 4 - Splendiferous 5 - Awesometastic by 2 people | Log in to rate

Ranked #4,040 in Arts , #89,184 overall

Cinema at its best!

This gritty, black and white psychological thriller was written and directed by Darren Aronofsky and produced on a shoe-string budget. The film has a compelling plot, assaulting visuals and the cinematogrpahy is superb. If you haven't seen this movie yet, be prepared for an intruiging, dark and thought-provoking journey.

The 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 about 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 differentiate 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. A brief moment of flashing "3.14 pi" is a reference to the Ghost of Cesar Soldevilla. 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.

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What is Pi? 

Pi is one of the most important mathematical constants, approximately equal to 3.14159, and represents the ratio of any circle's circumference to its diameter in Euclidean geometry. The number also represents the ratio of a circle's area to the square of its radius, and appears in many other formulas from mathematics and science. Pi is an irrational number, which means that its decimal expansion 3.1415926535897932... never ends or repeats. Throughout the history of mathematics, much effort has been made to determine Pi more accurately and understand its nature; fascination with the number has even carried over into culture at large.

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Pi T-shirts and Gifts 

These great Pi t-shirts are available in a variety of sizes and styles for men, women, kids and infants. They make great gifts for Pi enthusiasts of all ages. Designs are also available on buttons, stickers, mugs and more!

Play 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.

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Videos about Pi: Faith In Chaos 

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Kabbalah and Pi 

In the film, 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.

This 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.

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See other films directed by Darren Aronofsky. 

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by debbie1

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