{"id":617751,"date":"2023-03-14T09:49:08","date_gmt":"2023-03-14T14:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.sellorbuyhomefast.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/14\/the-movie-that-changed-how-people-understand-pi\/"},"modified":"2023-03-14T09:49:08","modified_gmt":"2023-03-14T14:49:08","slug":"the-movie-that-changed-how-people-understand-pi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/2023\/03\/14\/the-movie-that-changed-how-people-understand-pi\/","title":{"rendered":"The Movie That Changed How People Understand Pi"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

In 1998, not<\/span> yet 30 years old, director\u00a0Darren Aronofsky<\/a> released\u00a0Pi<\/em>, his scrappy black-and-white debut. Clocking in at a manic 84 minutes, the film is as smart as it is darkly comedic, a feat considering nearly all those minutes are spent inside the deteriorating mind of a math genius named Max Cohen as he fumbles toward a unified theory of the universe. Even now, 25 years later, its brilliance is evidenced in its impact.<\/p>\n

The decades have been good to\u00a0Pi<\/em>. Its happy swirl of Jewish mysticism, meaning-of-everything conspiracism, and Math\u2019s Greatest Hits (along with\u00a0pi<\/a>, it bangs through the Fibonnaci sequence, the golden ratio, and Archimedes in the tub) has aged well. Each year, the\u00a0concept of pi<\/a> seems to grow annually in crossover popularity, via memes, novelty T-shirts, and all the attendant hoopla around\u00a0Pi Day<\/a>. (A personal favorite pi-in-the-culture moment: MF Doom rapping \u201cEasy as pi, three point one four \/ one more one false move and you\u2019re done for\u201d on 2004\u2019s \u201cGreat Day.\u201d) So what role did the cultishly beloved\u00a0Pi<\/em> play in the growth of pi?<\/p>\n

\u201cI was making the movie in a very-early-internet universe,\u201d Aronofsky says. \u201cInformation didn\u2019t flow as obviously. You just had to hear things\u00a0from<\/em> people, learn about things\u00a0from<\/em> people. I remember when we were trying to research sacred geometry: There were only some fringe books that we had to order that took months to get to us. The Kabbalah stuff, it was before it had become part of the culture.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Similarly, Aronofsky is aware that pi\u2019s popularity has grown since his movie came out. \u201cSo, yeah, you always wonder,\u201d he says. \u201c\u2018Is it the film that influenced it? Or is it simultaneous with how the world is changing, and you\u2019re sort of somehow a messenger?\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Aronofsky and his producers raised the movie\u2019s budget a hundred US dollars at a time, effectively using the now internet-beloved technique of crowdfunding long before that was a familiar term. \u201cIt was a form letter,\u201d Aronofsky says. \u201cI still remember the opening: \u2018Yes, this is a form letter, but it\u2019s not because we don’t love you.\u2019\u201d They offered a return of $150 (\u00a3123), two tickets to the premiere, and a name in the credits\u2014if the movie was ever made, of course. \u201cThe people we were writing to, they probably thought we were out of our minds,\u201d he says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Since its release,\u00a0Pi<\/em> has become a touchstone for the math obsessed. \u201cThere are so many people from Silicon Valley that\u00a0Pi<\/em> was an important film for,\u201d Aronofsky says. \u201cYou know, they were the nerdy kids doing math and suddenly there was this movie that was showing how mind-expansive math can be. Jack Dorsey told me once that, as a teenage boy, it made math cool.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s pretty much<\/span> impossible to quantify, but anecdotally,\u00a0Pi<\/em> the movie has seemed to naturally fuel\u00a0\u03c0 the concept. It came a decade after the original Pi Day, which was started at the Exploratorium, San Francisco\u2019s learning center dedicated to \u201cscience, art, and human perception.\u201d Sam Sharkland, the center\u2019s senior program director, says that\u00a0Pi<\/em>\u2019s \u201cpromise\u00a0of somehow making sense out of something that almost defines randomness is alluring.\u201d Both Pi Day and the movie give meaning to \u201cconcepts that are hard to wrap our head around,\u201d he says, adding that the movie \u201cputs pi in the spotlight, elevating it beyond its simple function in geometric, grade school calculations.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s not just the film and Pi Day that have raised cultural awareness of\u00a03.14159265359. As Ursula Whitcher, an associate editor at\u00a0Mathematical Reviews<\/em>, the journal of the American Mathematical Society, notes, it\u2019s possible pi\u2019s popularity \u201cowes much more to the deliciousness of pie\u201d than it does to anything else, referencing the long-running tradition of baking to celebrate the mathematical constant.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Additionally,\u00a0Pi<\/em>\u2019s underlying rigorousness in its treatment of math concepts can leave some viewers less than satisfied. The 2012 book\u00a0Math Goes to the Movies<\/em> points out a few huge goofs, including the title sequence\u2019s misrepresentation of pi\u2019s decimal expansion. Representative quote: \u201cAll that Max says here is basically nonsense.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read More<\/a>
\n Amos Barshad<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1998, not yet 30 years old, director\u00a0Darren Aronofsky released\u00a0Pi, his scrappy black-and-white debut. Clocking in at a manic 84 minutes, the film is as smart as it is darkly comedic, a feat considering nearly all those minutes are spent inside the deteriorating mind of a math genius named Max Cohen as he fumbles toward<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":617752,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2177,685,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-617751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-changed","category-movie","category-technology"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617751\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/617752"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsycanuse.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}