Introduced by Keith Devlin

When a movie's main character is a mathematician, what is the "big picture" of mathematics the film delivers? And does it matter if it's wrong? Dr. Keith Devlin is Executive Director of the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University, and is the author of twenty-three books, including The Math Gene (Basic Books, 2000). He also appears regularly as "The Math Guy" on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition.

"Darren Aronofsky's Pi was the fever dream of the 1998 Sundance Film Festival...a hauntingly bizarre black-and-white fantasia made with daring ingenuity, especially in light of its $60,000 budget. With remarkable assurance, Aronofsky wrote and directed this startling debut feature about a tormented man (Sean Gullette) amid a swirl of numbers, and managed to incorporate such elements as searing headaches, Jewish mysticism, and a numerological theory of the stock market, showing off an imagination that knows no obvious bounds....Kafkaesque in its torment and claustrophobic tensions, Pi is a small but most impressive victory of independent imagination over the mundane. Aronofsky's showily erudite style bristles with originality and ambition (and) shows obsessive intensity and freewheeling vision."