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To: js1138
Someone has seen the movie "Pi" too many times.

Man, I *hated* that movie...

I had been looking forward to seeing it, because it was allegedly about math, and I love math, and a friend and I had fun fiddling around with Pi in college (yeah, we're nerds, I admit it), including calculating it to a ridiculous number of digits on the tiny computers available at the time, and he had a denim shirt that his sister had embroidered literally the first several hundred digits of Pi...

And reviews of the film generally said that it was "cerebral" and "based on higher mathematics" etc.

Then I saw it, and while it might have been an interesting avant-garde film for people who aren't too familiar with numbers, it was just *insulting* to the intelligence of anyone who was.

For one of the more egregious examples, the guy's searching for a "magic" 200-digit number (give or take, I forget the exact size, but it was in that range) that's somehow the answer to life, the universe, and everything (to crib from Douglas Adams...) So after weeks of slogging on it alone, he finally seeks help from another alleged math genius, and when they meet he describes his search to the new nerdslinger, and the new guy asks, "you have of course tried every 200-digit number?" And the protagonist replies impatiently, "of course, but..."

At that point I was ready to throw my shoe through the TV screen...

Anyone who has played around with large numbers at *all*, especially while doing permutations or probability or cryptography, has learned that a 200-digit number (or even much "smaller" numbers) is so un-freaking-believably huge that you if you could turn every atom into the earth into a supercomputer and put them all to work simultaneously on the task of examining all possible 200-digit numbers, you wouldn't have even a vanishingly small fraction of the job done before the universe died of old age...

This is just *basic* math knowledge. It's "Big Numbers 101" stuff. So to have this "cerebral" movie which is supposed to about math firing off howlers like that left and right is like... It's like having a "CSI" forensics show where one investigator casually asks the other, "you've individually tested every grain of sand on Earth, I take it?" and the other guy responds, "well of course I have, but..."

783 posted on 01/31/2005 12:42:24 AM PST by Ichneumon
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To: Ichneumon
Formulae for p.
800 posted on 01/31/2005 6:43:49 AM PST by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch is der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)
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