Movie Review: Pi

Pi: It's About Us

Pi is a film about us-about the people who are part of the Slashdot community. It's a film about the way we live. We work with intensity every day, pushing ourselves to the limit despite others, not for our own sake, but for the sake of an idea, a program, a truth. Max Cohen, the protagonist of Pi, takes that road: through exhaustion, madness and pain, towards truth.

The plot of Pi is as old as the concept of number itself; only its particulars are modern. Max Cohen, a number theorist and hacker, is fighting to discover a pattern-seemingly in the stock market, but really in the world. Using his computer, Euclid, a strange rackmounted contraption that looks a little like a VAX corpse without side panels, he feeds in stock data, hoping to discern a pattern that will allow him to pick the market. Other forces-a mysterious Wall Street company, a Chassidic rabbi and his court-are interested in what he might come up with, and try to insert themselves into his life. He must reject personal contact, his teacher, and anyone human who tries to detrack him from his goal. All the while, he must fight against himself, most of all; he's tormented by wrenching migraine headaches, physical exhaustion, and that strange contraction of the mind which comes with obsession and burnout. Pi does a great job of showing all this, without either mystifying it or getting details wrong. As Max shoots towards intellectual heights, his mind and body both rebel against him; his attempts to control both are necessary, desperate, and futile.

Against all this, we have the prize-a 216-digit number which may be the name of God, the seed for a neural network, or just a number. The movie tries to tantalize and irritate us, by showing us how evident mathematical patterns and their visualizations are in nature. We've all seen Julia sets and the whorls of snail shells and the golden spiral; the sheer audacity of trying to put them all together and have them make sense is believable as a goal for Cohen, and as something we can dream about.

The movie sets up a paradox which is as valid for itself as for the world: it can be viewed either as simple but allusive, or as all-embracingly complex. In my opinion, it's a classic even if it's simple; it gets inside the process of our work, and what we work for. Past "hacker" movies like Wargames, Real Genius and Sneakers are shown up as the Hollywood baloney they were all along; they're not even in the same genre. Pi, by contrast, gets it right. See it.

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