Ahoy the MacPerl List! I was hunting around for stuff about the Bourwein pi-computing algorithm and ran across your list's thread about it.
Would anyone like an HTML version of a really interesting New Yorker article about the Chudnovsky Brothers, who broke the pi-computing record several times -- they were the first, I think, to break a billion digits -- using a homebrew off-the-shelf supercomputer in their New York City slum apartment? They cooled it with hardware store fans and kept track of the temperature of critical components with a meat thermometer. (Their computer must always be kept below Pork.) The article is called "The Mountains of Pi." There's very little math in it, but a great deal of very interesting discussion by some of America's leading mathematicians like that on your List: Why the heck would anyone want to compute pi out to such lengths? The Chudnovskys used (FORTRAN to program) a variant of Ramanujan's 1914 pi-computing formula, which churns back eight new digits for every term and seems to be the fastest-converging formula known for pi. Be glad to supply that to anyone who wants it, too. Bob Merkin
