Cinema Science PI AND THE RAPTURE OF COMPLEX MATHEMATICS
To commemorate the eighth iteration of Cinema Science, this issue we’re doing something a little different. The typical mode of this column is to identify the scientific and mathematical content within a contemporary film – the kind of film that you can expect to find fresh on physical media, streaming services and in your students’ memories at the time of publication. But, two years down, I wanted to delve into the archives to examine Darren Aronofsky’s debut feature, the mathematically minded Pi (1998).
This necessitates a slightly different approach for a few reasons, with the main consequence being that the topics addressed here are primarily – if not totally – aimed at senior secondary Maths students. (Think: Mathematical Methods and Specialist Mathematics classrooms, or whatever your local equivalent might be.) That’s not entirely because of the content; many of the ideas covered herein – irrational numbers, recursive sequences, Pythagoras and his many contributions to mathematics – could comfortably be incorporated into earlier Mathematics curricula. Rather, this is mostly a reflection of the film itself.
Cinema Science typically centres on modern movies for purely logistical reasons; few Science or Maths classrooms can accommodate a viewing of an entire feature film, so choosing well-known, recently released films allows teachers to play clips or simply refer to the movie rather than playing it in its entirety. Not so here; with two decades having passed since Pi’s release, you’d be hard-pressed to find any high school student who would’ve heard of, let alone seen, the film. While Aronofsky has made some major films since – Requiem for a Dream (2000), Black Swan (2010) and, more recently, mother! (2017) – his debut is most fondly remembered by arthouse aficionados.
That’s for good reason – doesn’t make for easy viewing. Aronofsky worked mathematical concepts into the scaffolding of this paranoid thriller, incorporating the fleshy, cyber-body-horror aesthetic of (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1989) to produce an overexposed, monochrome monstrosity. As Aronofsky’s first film is rated M by Australia’s classification board, you’d in any
