It's about Enlightenment.

Rating: 9/10 (10 August 2004)

Mathematics is the language through which the Max is trying to understand the "logic" of the universe (in his case, the stock market is his microcosm). He is looking for Spinoza's (and Einstein's) "God"; the Natural Order of All Things.
The mathematics are also a major sense of Max's own identity. He's like a trained monkey, performing math tricks for the girl next door. Proving with each proof, that he knows who he is.
Max's struggle is analagous to the Jewish spiritualists, though he doesn't initially recognize that himself. Next to these pursuits, petty power games like those of the military industrial complex are derided. But they did serve a purpose...
Max's Professor had stroke. He blamed it on a certain mathematical pursuit.
He recognizes that his student is on the same path and warns him off--his life may hang in the balance.
But Max persists and his computer, like his professor's, at the penultimate moment--just *as* it's concluding the answer--has it's technological own version of a stroke and explodes.
So they talk and conclude that their machines (and the Professor himself, nearly) reached total consciousness. Where it... Understood. And in doing so, ceased to exist.
Max's life deteriorates as he surrenders all to his pursuit. He (literally at times) opens his mind up and *realizes* the Is; the Tao; he sees through the illusion of interpretation (as math is an interpretation of nature).
He realizes that his identity is merely an idea of himself, and in recognizing it, that part of him ceases to exist just as the computer--who could, like his ego, only deal with symbols and not reality--did.
Having reached this point of Enlightenment, Max no longer has a need to deal in symbols. When the young girl asks him to multiply huge numbers, he sees no point in that egoic performance. And instead of looking at the fractal patterns made by the leaves of the trees, Max instead just looks at the trees and is One with Nature.
And for I believe the only time in the film, Max is smiling and looks happy and content. And that's always a sure sign of a person who is realizing Enlightenment. After all, if Enlightenment is enacting the ultimate "knowing," then why would it be the ultimate act if it didn't get you the thing we all seek in all we do anyway?