I’m glad you listened to my suggestion.

I’m too tired to really delve into this onion.

But a few random thoughts:

– The Wall-street Firm chasing our protagonist all over the place. I kind of wonder if it’s a bit of a commentary on the materialism of modern Christianity?

– The movie does brush up against all 3 religions that have sprung out of Judaism. There’s a prayer/quote from Quran in the market scene.

– The cinematography black and white and either high tone or almost too dark. Creates an ongoing sense of disconnection from reality that coupled with the pace and soundtrack keeps viewer feeling off balance. You are never sure what, if any, of what you’re watching is real.

– the counterpoints between our protagonist’s obsession with unlocking Pi, Wall Street wanting the “key” to the stock market, the Rabbis with their obsession to deciphering the Torah. Each of these obsessions when flipped on their back display an indifference to the cost.

– The professor struggles between guiding our protagonist away from obsession and going there again himself. You have to wonder if he also slipped into obsession and the cost was his life.

– The movie just spirals downwards propelled by these themes. It doesn’t stop till our protagonist violently extricates himself from his own obsession.

It’s still a film I walk away from asking myself, what the heck did I just watch (again).

Ryissa

When I was consumed with work, and younger, I did not have this compulsion. Now – as if fulfilling a stereotype – it is the only thing I can care about. Everything else simply drops away. My children, my wife, my job. Obsession isn’t a strong enough word.

This will destroy me, and many more. The fact is that because of our luxurious lives we have more time to simply think and ponder, and these questions with no answers will forever haunt some of us.

\o/

Not a coincidence, really serious math people know their perfect cubes.

Taylor

In my country (Iran) , our economy is in critical state because it lacks the basics for a stable industry , so before i started my company , i came up with a business plan to make sure i can solve some of these issues and since i have the necessary knowledge to solve many of the engineering problems that i will face , the only things i needed were the necessary materials and additional personnel and for getting them i needed money and the EDA software was enough to fund my projects.
Our world is filled with suffering and pain that are caused by different reasons from natural disasters to terrorism and i will do my best to play my part in solving such problems.

And about your other question , Well i’m not a religious person despite being born in a religious country , but i do believe in a higher power and universal love and that belief has came after reading extensive amount of information from philosophy to researching about different spiritual cultures around the world and hopefully i was able to form a belief system in my mind and draw a line between what i can know and what i can’t. My father is a poet and a philosopher and he has knowledge in native american spirituality and Buddhism and he helped me a lot in this journey.

I started my journey by seeing from the lens of Mathematics and as i mentioned i got to the point that i couldn’t get more answers from such perspective , so i tried other perspectives.

Such journeys are purely subjective and since we live in a world that are filed with different ideologies and religions , it makes one’s path to find meaning in life really hard and it results in a nihilistic society , by having a balance between rationality and open mindedness a person can form a better view of the reality around him/her.

Hey there Saman, your english is fantastic. No worries there at all. Kudos to you. I’ve been meaning to reply to you since you wrote, but my life has been harried and complicated. My apologies.
Now, let me just say that you are smarter than me by a factor… so you have the floor sir. Say what you will and I won’t disagree. And no, I don’t know Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem. I just read about it on Wikipedia (the library for idiots like me!) But I think I understand the larger problem Godel was trying to prove after reading several different accounts of his theorems.

“One philosophical implication of such theorem is that , we can’t write some simple rules or Axioms and then logically derive the deepest mysteries of our universe. Logic has its own limitations , and sanity is the ability to think logically , but once you face problems that are outside the limitations of logic you step foot in the realm of insanity.”

Yeah I get that. That makes sense to me. Truth is deeper than a number or a factorial. Truth is deeper than an algorithm. Though we can learn things about truth through algorithms and theorems.

So I am taking it from your account that you can relate to poor insane Max? hahah. But instead of augering into the ground, you pulled your parachute ripchord and survived! That is very good news.

By the way, I would love to hear more about your business and they you chose to survive. What would someone as smart as you choose to do with your time instead of chasing the meaning of life in numbers? And also, if you don’t mind sharing? I’d love to know if you have any sort of belief in a higher power at all. Just curious as you seem like a very intelligent person who is well reasoned and logical. And yet, you see a conflict there with pure analytics.

Thanks for commenting Saman, I really found it interesting. Pi is an amazing movie, with a very interesting premise.