3.145...........

[robinturner]

Finally got round to seeing Pi, a film my friends had been urging me to see since it came out. I'm still not sure what to make of it. I like the fact that someone had the courage to make a film about mathematics, with very little action and no love interest. I liked the references to Go and the Qabalah, though it didn't really go deep enough into either of them. I could handle the black-and-white photography, though a lot of it was too obviously imitating Eraserhead.

But for a film supposedly about mathematics, there wasn't actually all that much math in it. It had a lot of numbers, but there was probably more mathematical theory in Jurassic Park. I'm no mathematician myself, but I do find mathematical ideas interesting: recursion, chaos theory, etc.. What I was hoping for was something about the relation between these ideas and the world, but after a very promising beginning, Pi turned into another of those "crazy mathematician" stories. I expect I will find A Beautiful Mind similarly dissappointing.

Maybe the film is meant to be like the number.

Comments

Oh my Godness

[bram.livejournal.com]

Your calculator may be smarter than it lets on.

It may store more digits than it shows. If you subtract 3 from pi and multiply by 10, that 4 at the end may be replaced with 36. And then if you subtract 1 from 1.415926536 and multiply by 10 you may get 4.159265359. Does it work?