Panic in Level 4: Cannibals, Killer Viruses, and Other Journeys to the Edge of Science by Richard Preston Page A

floor to ceiling. The brothers had wedged the paper, sheet by sheet, into manila folders, until the folders had grown as fat as melons. The paper was also stacked chest-high to chin-high on five chairs (three of them in a row beside his bed). It was heaped on top of and filled two steamer trunks that sat beneath the window, and the paper had accumulated in a sort of unstable-looking lava flow on a small folding cocktail table. I moved carefully around the room, fearful of triggering a paperslide, and I sat down on the room’s one empty chair, facing the foot of Gregory’s bed, my knees touching the blanket. The paper surrounded his bed like the walls of a fortress, and his bed sat at the center of the keep. I sensed a profound happiness in Gregory Chudnovsky. His happiness, it occurred to me later, sprang from the delicious melancholy of a life spent largely in bed while he explored a more perfect world that opened through the portals of mathematics into vistas beyond time or decay.
    “The system of this paper is archaeological,” he said. “By looking at a slice, I know the date. This slice is from five years ago. Over here is some paper from four years ago. What you see in this room is our working papers, as well as the papers we used as references. Some of the references we pull out once in a while to look at, and then we leave them in another pile. Once, we had to make a Xerox copy of the same book three times, and we put it in three different piles, so we could be sure to find it when we needed it. There are books in there by Kipling and Macaulay. Eh, this place is a mess. Actually, when we want to find a book it’s easier to go to the library.”
    Much of the paper consisted of legal pads covered with Gregory’s handwriting. His handwriting was dense and careful, a flawless minuscule written with a felt-tipped pen. The writing contained a mixture of theorems, calculations, proofs, and conjectures concerning numbers. He used a felt-tip pen because he didn’t have enough strength in his hand to press a pencil on paper. Mathematicians who had visited Gregory Chudnovsky’s bedroom had come away dizzy, wondering what secrets the scriptorium might hold. He cautiously referred to the steamer trunks beneath the window as valises. They were filled to the lids with compressed paper. When Gregory and David flew to Europe to speak at conferences on the subject of numbers, they took both “valises” with them, in case they needed to refer to a proof or a theorem. Their baggage particularly annoyed Belgian officials. “The Belgians were always fining us for being overweight,” Gregory said.
    The brothers’ mail-order supercomputer made their lives more convenient. It performed inhumanly difficult algebra, finding roots of gigantic systems of equations, and it constructed colored images of the interior of Gregory Chudnovsky’s body. They used the supercomputer to analyze and predict fluctuations in the stock market. They had been working with a well-known Wall Street investor named John Mulheren, helping him get a profitable edge in computerized trades on the stock market. One day I called John Mulheren to find out what the brothers had been doing for him. “Gregory and David have certainly made us money,” Mulheren said, but he wouldn’t give any details on what the brothers had done. Mulheren had been paying the Chudnovskys out of his trading profits; they used the money to help fund their research into numbers. To them, numbers were more beautiful, more nearly perfect, possibly more complicated, and arguably more real than anything in the world of physical matter.

     

    T HE NUMBER PI , or, is the most famous ratio in mathematics. It is also one of the most ancient numbers known to humanity. Nobody knows when pi first came to the awareness of the human species. Pi may very well have been known to the builders of Stonehenge, around 2,600 B.C.E . Certainly it was known to the ancient Egyptians. Pi is approximately