Personal
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| Date Created: | 2010-09-08 |
| Date Modified: | 2010-09-08 |
General
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| Author: | Paul Hoffman |
| Binding: | Hardback |
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| Amazon Link: | Buy from Amazon.com |
Publishing
| Publisher: | Fourth Estate |
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| Publication Year: | 1998 |
| ISBN#: | 1-85702-811-2 |
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| Pages: | 301 |
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Comments
Paul Erdös was an amazing and prolific mathematician whose life as a world- wandering, numerical nomad was legendary. He published almost 1500 scholarly papers before his death in 1996, and he probably thought more about maths problems than anyone in history. Like a travelling salesman offering his thoughts as wares, Erdös would show up on the doorstep of one mathematician or another and announce, "My brain is open." After working through a problem, he'd move on to the next place, the next solution.
Hoffman's book, like Sylvia Nasar's biography of John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, reveals the life of a genius who transcended the merely quirky. But Erdös's brand of madness was joyful, unlike Nash's despairing schizophrenia. Erdös never tried to dilute his obsessive passion for numbers with ordinary emotional interactions, thus avoiding hurting the people around him, as Nash did. Oliver Sacks writes of Erdös: "A mathematical genius of the first order, Paul Erdös was totally obsessed with his subject--he thought and wrote mathematics for nineteen hours a day until the day he died. He travelled constantly, living out of a plastic bag, and had no interest in food, sex, companionship, art--all that is usually indispensable to a human life."
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers is easy to love, despite his strangeness. It's hard not to have affection for someone who referred to children as "epsilons", from the Greek letter used to represent small quantities in mathematics; a man whose epitaph for himself read, "Finally I am becoming stupider no more"; and whose only really necessary tool to do his work was a quiet and open mind. Hoffman, who followed and spoke with Erdös over the last 10 years of his life, introduces us to an undeniably odd, yet pure and joyful, man who loved numbers more than he loved God--whom he referred to as SF, for Supreme Fascist. He was often misunderstood, and he certainly annoyed people sometimes, but Paul Erdös is no doubt missed. -- Therese Littleton