"Life Stories: profiles from the New Yorker"

[fiefoe]

"The Mountains of Pi" (the Chudnovsky Brothers) / Richard Preston  (1992)

    Preston must have tried to resist the pun - 'to probe the endless scrap of leftover pi' - but failed.

    The writer's affection for the eccentric, brilliant pair and their 'old-fashioned Russo-Yankee style' is apparent. (A prime example: to find hot spots inside their DIY supercomputer, they used a meat thermometer with "Beef Rare - Ham - Beef Med - Pork" marked on its dial.) Because of Gregory Chudnovsky 's illness, he is mostly apartment-bound. There, 'his happiness,.. sprang from the delicious melancholy of a life chained to a bed in a disordered world that breaks open through the portals of mathematics into vistas beyond time or decay'.

    Food for thought:

• The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. [Eugene Wigner]
• God made the integers, all else is the work of man. [Leopold Kronecker]
• While there is reason to doubt the existence of God, by (some mathematicians') way of thinking there is no good reason to doubt the existence of the circle.
• Gregory: "Everything in mathematics does exist now. It's a matter of naming it."
• David: "Your brain is ... mostly made of connections. If I may say so, your brain is a liquid-cooled parallel supercomputer." He pointed to his nose. "This is the fan."
  

Supplementary links:  Book of Kells, supercomputers, Pirandello (author of "Six Characters in Search of an Author").