CHEKIT: Slicing up Pi, and putting the Unicorn back together

As far as mathematicians go, Gregory and David Chudnovsky are like Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. Except more talented. Back in 1992, New Yorker contributor Richard Preston wrote a profile about them and their little project, their home-grown alternative to multi-million dollar supercomputing, m zero:

The Chudnovskian supercomputer, m zero, burns two thousand watts of power, and it runs day and night. The brothers don’t dare shut it down; if they did, it might die. At least twenty-five fans blow air through the machine to keep it cool; otherwise something might melt. Waste heat permeates Gregory’s apartment, and the room that contains m zero climbs to a hundred degrees Fahrenheit in summer. The brothers keep the apartment’s lights turned off as much as possible. If they switched on too many lights while m zero was running, they might blow the apartment’s wiring. Gregory can’t breathe city air without developing lung trouble, so he keeps the apartment’s windows closed all the time, with air-conditioners running in them during the summer, but that doesn’t seem to reduce the heat, and as the temperature rises inside the apartment the place can smell of cooking circuit boards, a sign that m zero is not well. A steady stream of boxes arrives by Federal Express, and an opposing stream of boxes flows back to mail-order houses, containing parts that have bombed, along with letters from the brothers demanding an exchange or their money back. The building superintendent doesn’t know that the Chudnovsky brothers have been using a supercomputer in Gregory’s apartment, and the brothers haven’t expressed an eagerness to tell him.

Recently, they were asked to tackle something a little less crazy than their previous nine-thousand-names-of-God enterprise - could they try to put some pretty pictures back together? That piece, also by Preston, together with the Pi quest, tell the story of two brothers, the people who care for and about them, and what brilliance smells like (burning circuitry, apparently.) It's some of the best stuff I've seen in the New Yorker.