π
Released in 1998. Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky. Rated R for language and disturbing imagery.
CAST:
Max believes that everything in life can be reduced to underlying patterns, or its basic math (kind of like Lawrence Waterhouse). His theory is as follows:
- Mathematics is the language of nature;
- Everything around us can be represented and understood by numbers;
- If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge. Therefore: there are patterns everywhere in nature.
The project that he is currently working on is to find a pattern in the stock market. He has built a supercomputer called Euclid (a little in-joke, as Euclid, in Elements of Geometry, made certain observations that resulted in the discovery of π) to help him find this pattern.
Max's research with Euclid does not go unnoticed. A young woman named Marcy Dawson leaves cryptic messages on his answering machine, and arranges to bump into him "accidentally." She claims to be from a Wall Street firm that wants to hire him. While sitting in a diner, he meets a Hasidic Jew named Lenny Meyer, who tells him that the Torah is also numerical, and that people have been trying to find the underlying code of it as well.
As a result of these chance meetings, Max is a desirable commodity. This furthers his paranoia and heightens his stress, resulting in more migraines and hallucinations. At one point, he sees a human brain pulsing on the floor of a New York City subway car. It also drives his research. Unfortunately, Euclid keeps spitting out a 216 digit bug. This bug has been found before, by Sol. It is what caused his nervous breakdown. 216 is also believed, by Kabalists, to be the number of letters in the ultimate name of God. So everyone wants this number, which truly exists only in Max's mind.