The Mountains of Pi (1992)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/04/11/capturing-the-...
I think I got somewhere in the 1970s before I gave up :)
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".
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.
"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.'"