A selection of stories from The New Yorker’s archive
The Numbers Game
Tomorrow, believe it or not, is a holiday, albeit an informal one: it’s Pi Day, which falls on March 14th (or 3/14, echoing the first three digits of the mathematical constant). A year ago, to mark the occasion, we asked the mathematician Steven Strogatz to write an essay for our Web site explaining why pi is worth celebrating. Pi, he wrote, “puts infinity within reach.” It’s also crucial to the math not just of circles but of cycles (which are, when you think about it, circles in time). Pi, Strogatz pointed out, “appears in the math that describes the gentle breathing of a baby.” Structural engineers use it to think about earthquakes. Oceanographers use it to think about waves. It’s everywhere.
That’s true, of course, about math more generally—and so, this week, we bring you pieces about mathematics, numbers, and the ways they shape our world. Some selections focus on pure math: in “The Mountains of Pi,” Richard Preston meets two brothers who are determined to explore pi’s outer (or inner) reaches and who, to that end, have constructed a supercomputer in their apartment. Others are about math in ordinary life: in “The Professor of Baseball,” Ben McGrath profiles Bill James, whose use of statistics has revolutionized the game. Finally, for good measure, we’ve included Alva Johnston’s 1933 profile of Albert Einstein—a man, Johnston conceded, whose “definitive biography should be written in mathematical symbols.” For us non-mathematicians, words will have to do.
—David Remnick
Profiles | March 2, 1992
The Mountains of Pi
To the Chudnovsky brothers, numbers are more beautiful, more nearly perfect, possibly more complicated, and arguably more real than anything in the world of physical matter. The brothers have lately been using their supercomputer, m zero, to explore the number pi.
BY RICHARD PRESTON
Profiles | February 2, 2015
The Pursuit of Beauty
The problem that Yitang Zhang chose, in 2010, is from number theory, a branch of pure mathematics. Pure mathematics, as opposed to applied mathematics, is done with no practical purposes in mind. It is as close to art and philosophy as it is to engineering.
BY ALEC WILKINSON
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