For people who don't know math or science

Rating: 5/10 (22 December 2002)

* warning: mild spoilers *
While intellectually this film is actually beyond the normal Hollywood fare (because it's not from Hollywood), most of the people who find beauty or truth or whatever in this movie reflects on the poverty of math and science education in America (and possibly elsewhere). Here are a few things that show why.
1. Patterns are everywhere because there's no fixed set of patterns. And it's a reflection "after the fact." In other words, you can find patterns everywhere but they are by definition a reflection of what has happened. The movie mentions it but drops it in favor of some theological meaning. That's fine for the movie's purpose; otherwise there'd be no story. But to think that's true in life would be a big mistake.
2. Pi takes the conventional wisdom especially from religions: that humans can't understand and thus be "god" without bad things happening. This is why at the end the genius destroys his own ingenuity and becomes happy as an average guy. "Ignorance is bliss," so the Church once told its believers. Most people still seem to accept it today.
3. For those who scoff at 216, it's actually a very long number. There are virtually 10^26 permutations (the Hasidics said it's a 216-word name), since every digit can be anything from 0 to 10. That's 100 TRILLION TRILLION [sic] possibilities, so when Max said the Jews had tried all of them but couldn't understand "the context," it's wrong.
Things like these should be apparent to anyone who's taken the advanced math classes in high school. Few movies treat science with the respect it deserves, and though this one is respectful it still uses the cliches against it. That so many people find this picture deep shows that science and math are pathetic subjects in American schools.