Review of Pi (1998) by Rosa R — 15 Jul 2011

The genius of Darren Aranofsky's debut is not in the story, but in the creative way it's told--the cinematography, music, soundtrack, editing. But what is the story? A loner computer/math whiz who's on the verge of making a tremendous discovery, a numerical key to the stock market's performance.

Jewish mystics also think he may be on to The sacred Number of God. Yet the closer he gets to solving this problem, the worse his headaches get, and the more problems his homemade computer suffers. Moreover, he learns a math mentor of his suffered a stroke while trying to solve the same problem.

There's the basic setup. Aronofsky evidently has heard of Turing's Halting problem, and perhaps of Cherniak's little short story reproduced in the book "The Mind's Eye", about a mathematician/logician who discovers a paradox that literally puts his mind in an infinite loop he can't break out of.

But Aronofsky doesn't quite get it--as we can tell when he has the computer understand its own "silicon nature". These self-referential paradoxes aren't about self-awareness of what STUFF you're made of.

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