The Perfect Number

Rating: 8/10 (4 October 2003)

********SPOILERS******* Max Cohen, Sean Gullette, is obsessed with numbers. A mathematical genius who earned a PHD at the age of 16 has a theory about the universe and wants to prove it to his own satisfaction. 1. Math is the language of the universe. 2. Everything around us can be understood by numbers. 3. If you graph a number of any system patterns emerge, therefor patterns are everything in nature.
We're told by Max at the beginning of the movie that when he was a little boy his mother warned him not to stare into the sun because it would hurt his eyes, but Max did. He stared so long into the sun that he temporarily went blind. This may be the reason in the movie "Pi" why Max keeps getting terrible headaches and why he's constantly taking medication to relive them.
In his apartment in New York's Chinatown Max built Euclid a powerful computer that he feels can prove his theory. Using the stock market as a model Max tries to prove that even that can be deciphered by his calculations and feeds stock quotes into Euclid to prove his point by predicting their rising and falling in the future.
Patterns are everywhere in nature, Max says, even in the stock market. One afternoon when Max puts Euclid to it's final test to see if his theory is correct the computer crashes. Before it did it printed out a long string of numbers that seemed to make no sense at all to Max who threw it in the garbage.
Hurt that all that he did to prove his theory went up in smoke, Max goes to see his former mathematics and psychics professor Sol Robeson, Mark Margolis, to get some support and sympathy.
When Sol hears that Euclid printed a list of numbers before it crashed he gets very excited and asks Max how many numbers, 100, 1,000 216 how many? Max told Sol that it was all meaningless to him and that he threw it away. Later sitting in a diner Max runs into Lenny Meyer, Ben Shenkman, an Hasidic Jew who's also interested in numbers in the interpretation of the Kabbala. Lenny then tries to get Max interested in the mysteries of the Kabbala. Max doesn't realize at the time but later in the movie when he's saved from a gang of Wall Street goons by Lenny and his Hasidic friends that the number of God in the Talmud is exactly 216 digits! The number that he so foolishly discarded after Euclid crashed! The same number of digits that Sol gave him about how many numbers did his computer print out before it blew. Max, before he found out just what that number meant, starts to realize that there was something in what Euclid's last communication was but that he stupidly threw it away. Going back to the garbage where he threw the paper with the numbers away Max finds that it's long gone.
Earlier in the movie "Pi" we were introduced to an executive of a Wall Street firm Marcy Dawson, Pamela Hart, who was constantly pestering Max to lend his knowledge and services to her firm. Always ignoring and trying to avoid her things changed but after the crash of Max's computer Euclid. It's when Marcy offers Max something called a Ming Mecca chip, which is classified by the US government, Max suddenly becomes interested. Max needs that chip to restart his computer and find out what that important number that he so foolishly threw away was.
With everything set Max starts up Euclid and after some hesitation the elusive 216 digit number comes up on the screen but for some reason doesn't get printed so Max writes it down on a piece of paper and programs it back into the computer. With Euclid giving out information Max then sees that he can predict stock prices ahead of time. It's now that Max realizes that Sol has been keeping this information about a 216 digit number that can interpret all the patterns of the universe from him all these years.
Going to Sol's apartment to confront him about what he found out and why Sol tried to keep him from finding it out, Max is told by a nurse who answered the door that Sol passed away the day before. In Sol's apartment Max sees papers on which Sol wrote about what the same elusive number, God's number, was and what it meant and it seemed that the stress of all that work on Sol's part cause his death.
Max finally realized, what Sol did years ago, that there is some knowledge that is better kept to itself for it's too dangerous for anyone to pursue.
Very weird and at the same time interesting film by Darren Aronofsky about math and what math has to do with the working with the universe and how someone can become so obsessed with it that it can destroy him and everyone else that he comes in contact with.