I saw a sneak preview of Pi in Westwood, CA after finding a strange rack-card at Tower Records. The front of the card had the symbol pi and the digits printed in microscopic text in the background. The back had two showtimes, one that very night and one the next. This was 1998--the fledgling Google had no information on the film. I went to see it and was absolutely gobsmacked. I forced my friend to come to the second showing with me.
The math was fascinating to me but the thing that really made an impression was that computer. I could find no information at the time but later searches turned up that New Yorker article on the Chudnovsky brothers.
Given that Aronofsky grew up in New York, I would not be surprised if he heard about the Chudnovsky brothers in the Russian Jewish community.
Re:The Mountains of Pi (1992)
by philomathdan on Monday April 20, 2020 @09:08PM
(#22930786)
Looks like you're right. From an article in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/film/1999/jan/05/features):
"Aronofsky was inspired by such real-life pi-chasers as the Russian mathematician brothers Chudnovski who built a supercomputer in their own cramped Manhattan apartment and calculated pi to two billion digits. But most people don't look for patterns in pi, he says: 'You basically use it to test the speed of a supercomputer. The brothers called me a quack - they told me there's no pattern.'"
12:45. Restate my assumptions
I saw that movie first at 3am after being awake for far too long. It was like a fever dream. Deeply affecting, the obsession and inability to explain that obsession to people except a "select few".