Similarities between Pi and Anathem
After watching Pi again last night, the movie took on a new meaning for me. Originally I interpreted it as a modern Icarus story, but after reading Anathem by Neal Stephenson, I realized that it's a bit more complex than that. In Anathem, the idea of the "Hylaean Theoric World" plays a central role in the plot. The HTW is a solution to the problem of universals, and is essentially another name for Plato's Theory of Forms in that it posits a separate world where mathematically perfect universals exist (in some sense), and we can only catch imperfect glimpses of them in our world. While I personally believe that the Theory of Forms is based on an idea of perception that is fundamentally wrong, it does offer a strong appeal to mathematicians and those who work with similar abstractions. Pi is a story about one such mathematician who manages to "break through" to the HTW and glimpse some fundamental truth about our world, which he can't handle.