Not a good movie for math people
I love math and saw this movie hoping for the best. Unfortunately, this movie's plot is very unrealistic for the mathematical thinker.
shareI'm inclined to agree, but on different grounds.
I see this movie as a bit "over-intellectualized", ie. the writer _thought_ EVERYTHING through for us. All the small hints of "intellect vs nature" are there if you watch through the movie. It was a bit too linear for me even on the first run. From the beginning, the writer clearly had just one big agenda in mind.
Firstly, the morale was engineered for us. Ie. there are no real conflicts in the movie, besides the main actor's personal conflict with his own mind and body, and the few skirmishes with unimportant side characters (the jews and the mafia types). Nature is likewise, only depicted as "something nice to glare stupidly at" or "something which bugs out equipment" and "something to wipe out". No real nature experiences, and thus we were completely removed from nature throughout the movie.
Where is intuition? Where is insight? Love? Premonition? Sixth sense? Animal communion? No, only over-intellectualized tripe about a mathematical pattern and doom and gloom over discovering anything about it. The author clings frantically to the known (maths), in order to escape the (supposed) horrors of the unknown, despite the fact that all knowledge comes from the unknown and not from what we already know.
Mathematically, IF there really was the same pattern behind everything on earth, it would allways have to permutate all the causes, in order to calculate effects. Since stockmarket graphs, and any measurements we use are imperfect, our estimates will also be imperfect on so many levels it's not even funny. Incidentally, IF the pattern can predict the next step alone, it can be used to recursively predict every step thereafter, which is too complex to accomplish with any meaningful degree of certainty with just a simple pattern of a number, PI, which is just a ratio after all.
Mathematically speaking, you CAN predict the stockmarket. However, you can not predict when you're wrong and when it diverges, before it happens. So it's not that simple to gain anything from it, even when you have all the numbers. It's because the graphs, the numbers, are measurements of an UNDERLYING NATURE, it is not the nature in itself. Trying to predict will always be an incomplete estimate, and those who make fortunes are those who can be honest with themselves where they might be wrong, more than trying to be right all the time..
So interesting movie and very good arguments in the movie, but it didn't do much for me personally as it didn't EARN the depth I was looking for in the movie in any way.
I AM however intrigued by the movie wether there is a pattern in PI or not, but I doubt it will have much predictive powers, and probably some math gurus have solved the problem already. At least it should be non-repeatable as far as I know, but that is just my trust that the math gurus know what their proof's about, so I'm inclined to BELIEVE there is no such pattern.
Oh wait, this sequence is interesting: 884509627386359275033751967 943067599621731590401694134 434007629683591574337516791 197615733475195375920401694 343151239621353184932676605 800621596380716399501371459 954387507655892533875618750 354029981152863950711207613AAARGH I CAN'T HANDLE ANYMORE!! GOD RELEASE MY pAIIIINN!!!!1one!!