His condition doesn’t seem to be getting better, and doesn’t seem to be getting worse.

“I have to lie in bed most of the time,” Gregory once told me. The symptoms, in his case, are muscular weakness and difficulty in breathing. He has severe myasthenia gravis, an auto-immune disorder of the muscles. He walks in a slow, dragging shuffle, leaning on a bentwood cane, while his brother, David, typically holds him under one arm, to prevent him from toppling over. He has a long beard, streaked with gray, and dark, unruly hair, a wide forehead, and wide-spaced brown eyes. Gregory Chudnovsky is thirty-nine years old, and he has a spare frame and a bony, handsome face. So far, the brothers have spent around seventy thousand dollars on parts for their supercomputer, and much of the money has come out of their wives’ pockets. It is a black monolith, seven feet tall and eight feet across, in the shape of a squat cylinder, and is cooled by liquid freon. A Cray Y-MP C90 costs more than thirty million dollars. The brothers claim that m zero is a “true, general-purpose supercomputer,” and that it is as fast and powerful as a somewhat older Cray Y-MP, but it is not as fast as the latest of the Y-MP machines, the C90, an advanced supercomputer made by Cray Research. It occupies the former living room of Gregory’s apartment, and its tentacles reach into other rooms.

The Chudnovsky brothers call their machine m zero. Gregory Chudnovsky’s partner in the design and construction of the supercomputer was his older brother, David Volfovich Chudnovsky, who is also a mathematician, and who lives five blocks away from Gregory. He lives in Saskatoon, Canada, with the writer Alice Kuipers and their four children.īecome a fan of Yann on Facebook.Gregory and David Chudnovsky, both mathematicians, built their computer as an investigative tool. Born in Spain in 1963, Martel studied philosophy at Trent University, worked at odd jobs-tree planter, dishwasher, security guard-and traveled widely before turning to writing. He is also the award-winning author of The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios (winner of the Journey Prize), Self, Beatrice & Virgil, and 101 Letters to a Prime Minister. Yann Martel is the author of Life of Pi, the #1 international bestseller and winner of the 2002 Man Booker (among many other prizes). He lives in Saskatoon, Canada, with the writer Alice Kuipers and their four children.

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