»In which we are ignoring the supercomputer in the room

My father sent along two articles on the Chudnovsky Mathematician from The New Yorker magazine: on the reconstruction of the Unicorn Tapestry at The Cloisters; and on the search for π with a home-made supercomputer. Richard Preston's articles are fun, lucid, and breath-taking: the sheer inventiveness of the science that the Mathematician (for they are an entity comprised of two individual bodies) tackles, and the delirious interaction with the physical world — a computer built of parts from Home Depot, tucked into a two-bedroom apartment — a discovery of the warp and weft of one of the world's most intricate tapestries — make the articles all the more delightful.