Paul Erdos 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 math problems than anyone in history.
Like a traveling salesman offering his thoughts as wares, Erdos
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 a
genius's life that transcended the merely quirky. But Erdos's brand
of madness was joyful, unlike Nash's despairing schizophrenia.
Erdos 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 Erdos: "A
mathematical genius of the first order, Paul Erdos was totally
obsessed with his subject--he thought and wrote mathematics for
nineteen hours a day until the day he died. He traveled 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 Erdos 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 Erdos is no
doubt missed. --Therese Littleton
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