Pi (film)
1998 film directed by Darren Aronofsky
Pi (stylized as π) is a 1998 American conceptual psychological thriller film written and directed by Darren Aronofsky (in his feature directorial debut). Pi was filmed on high-contrast black-and-white reversal film. The title refers to the mathematical constant pi. The story focuses on a mathematician with an obsession to find underlying complete order in the real world and contrasting two seemingly irreconcilable entities: the imperfect irrationality of humanity and the rigor and regularity of mathematics, specifically number theory. The film explores themes of religion, mysticism, and the relationship of the universe to mathematics.
The film received positive reviews and earned Aronofsky the Directing Award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival, the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay and the Gotham Open Palm Award.
Plot
Unemployed number theorist Max Cohen, who lives in a drab apartment in Chinatown, Manhattan, believes everything in nature can be understood through numbers. He suffers from cluster headaches, extreme paranoia, hallucinations, and social anxiety disorder. His only social interactions are with his mathematics mentor, Sol Robeson (now disabled from a stroke), and those who live in his building: Jenna, a little girl fascinated by his ability to perform complex calculations, and Devi, a young woman living next door who sometimes speaks with him.
Max tries to program his computer, named Euclid, to make stock predictions.
“Pi (film)” enters the record as 1998 film directed by Darren Aronofsky. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what film, directed and Darren can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q937762. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 4 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pi (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.