One for the math nerds.

[unless]

This reminds me of the movie Pi - searching for a number/relationship that will decipher the pattern inherent in the universe. Very heady stuff.

I strongly recommend Pi for those that haven't seen it. It's from Darren Aronofsky and shares much of the same jarring visual style that he used in Requiem for a Dream.

In addition to the research in the above article, there's of course also Fibonocci Numbers which are seen all throughout nature. There is also a lot of cool research going on right now with fractals and how organisms actually grow into such predefined forms utilizing such minimal amounts of data (i.e. DNA). The human mind attempting to rationalize the chaotic universe all around it is an amazing thing.
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God...as a math student, that movie drove me completely nuts. The math in it is so BS that it makes me pull my hair out.

Example: just after the main character is kidnapped by the orthodox Jews, and they explain their problem to him (searching for the 216-letter name of God), he says that surely, they must have read out every 216-letter combination aloud already? And they respond in the affirmative.

As I recall, Hebrew has 22 letters in its alphabet (giving or taking a couple here wouldn't matter). The reality here is this:

Take every human being who has ever lived (just over 12 billion). Have each of them speak one 216-letter word per second (which is clearly impossible, but we'll let it slide). Without any duplication, it would still take many times longer than the current estimated age of the universe to complete this task.

The idea that a small sect wearing funny hats could pull this off in a few millenia is beyond absurd, it's insulting, particularly in a movie that purports to be about a mathematician. GRR!

I mean, if it were really hard math, I could understand it, but this could be figured out by anyone with a basic grasp of algebra and a decent calculator in about twenty seconds. The idea that this supposed "genius" mathematician would believe it for a moment is the equivalent in both plausibility and intellectual merit of a scene in which a police psychologist interviews a deranged killer, and begins to loudly and vigorously gnaw the flesh off his hand fifteen seconds into the Rorschach test. It's dumb and insulting, and yes I'm done ranting now.

Sorry about that.