Pi (movie)
π (pronounced, and often written as, Pi) is a 1998 American science fiction film directed by Darren Aronofsky. The film is about an aloof "genius" who believes that mathematics is the language of nature, and pursues the fundamental formula for it. He finds the golden spiral occurring everywhere, including in an analysis of the stock exchange which he is carrying out. A number of mysterious people become interested in his research, including a Go-playing mathematician who seems his mentor, 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.The film is in monochrome and stars Sean Gullette, Mark Margolis, Ben Shenkman, Pamela Hart, Stephen Pearlman, and Samia Shoaib.
π had an extremely low budget ($60,000), and made huge profits ($3.2 million gross in the U.S.). Darren Aronofsky made the movie Requiem for a Dream after π.
While the film's characters make several mathematical "goofs", such as claiming that the kabbalists could recite the phonetic equivalents of all 216-digit numbers in only two thousand years, it is notable that Sean Gullette's character pursues a legitimate scientific goal (though through questionable "scientific" means). His belief that diverse systems embodying highly nonlinear dynamics share a unifying pattern is much in the tradition of James Clerk Maxwell, whose equations unified the description of electricity and magnetism, in the process predicting that light is an electromagnetic wave.
π launched the film scoring career of Clint Mansell.
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