Paul Hoffman

Based on a National Magazine Award-winning article, this masterful biography of Hungarian-born Paul Erdos is both a vivid portrait of an eccentric genius and a layman's guide to some of this century's most startling mathematical discoveries.

The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

The biography of a mathematical genius. Paul Erdos was the most prolific pure mathematician in history and, arguably, the strangest too. '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 he died. He travelled constantly, living out of a plastic bag and had no interest in food, sex, companionship, art -- all that is usually indispensible to a human life. Paul Hoffman, in this marvellous biography, gives us a vivid and strangely moving portrait of this singular creature, one that brings out not only Erdos's genius and his oddness, but his warmth and sense of fun, the joyfulness of his strange life.' Oliver Sacks For six decades Erdos had no job, no hobbies, no wife, no home; he never learnt to cook, do laundry, drive a car and died a virgin. Instead he travelled the world with his mother in tow, arriving at the doorstep of esteemed mathematicians declaring 'My brain is open'. He travelled until his death at 83, racing across four continents to prove as many theorems as possible, fuelled by a diet of espresso and amphetamines. With more than 1,500 papers written or co-written,

The Story of Paul Erdös and the Search for Mathematical Truth

The Man who Loved Only Numbers

Gavin

"What would you say to Jesus if you saw him on the street?" 
Erdős said he'd ask Jesus if the Continuum Hypothesis was true. "And there would be three possible answers for Jesus," Erdős said. "He could say, 'Godel and Cohen already taught you everything which is to be known about it.' The second answer would be, 'Yes, there is an answer but unfortunately your brain isn't sufficiently developed yet to know the answer.' And Jesus could give a third answer: 'The Father, the Holy Ghost, and I have been thinking about that long before creation, but we haven't yet come to a conclusion.'

A life of a saint. Not in the sense of a moral paragon - though he was very kind when he wasn't being stubborn - but in the sense of a man devoted to, possessed by one thing, a high and rare thing that sets him some way beyond society. No money, no fixed abode, no lovers, no children, no religion. 80% of his family eaten by Nazi Germany. And yet a glorious, constructive, hilarious life. A champion moocher, eternal couchsurfer, generous and ascetic, witty and worldly. We are lucky to have had him.

  I [Hoffman] slept where he slept and stayed up nineteen hours a day, watching him prove and conjecture. I felt silly not being able, at the age of thirty, to keep up with a sickly looking seventy-three-year-old man. I suppose I could have shared his pills, but the only stimulant I took was caffeine.


  He abhorred discussions of sex as much as he disliked the act itself... In the late 1940s, during the Chinese civil war, Erdős took part in a food drive for the Communist Chinese. "I remember walking into a big room in Los Angeles, at UCLA, I think," said Vazsonyi, "and there was Erdős and all these people making packages of food. Some mischief-makers who knew of his disgust at naked women offered to make a $100 donation if he'd go with them to a burlesque show." To their astonishment, he immediately took them up on the offer. Afterwards, when they forked over the $100, he revealed the secret of his victory: "See! I tricked you, you trivial beings! I took off my glasses and did not see a thing!"


Unlike Perelman, the other late-C20th-century mathematical saint, Erdős had a wicked sense of fun and style. Like him, Erdős let himself be completely dependent on others for housing and logistics, and demanded much of them.

  he expected his hosts to lodge him, feed him, and do his laundry, along with anything else he needed, as well as arrange for him to get to his next destination.



  Erdos started developing his private language... referring to Communists as people "on the long wave-length," because in the electromagnetic spectrum the red waves were long. He said that Horthy supporters and other Fascist sympathizers were "on the short wavelength." That's also when he started calling children and other small things "epsilons," grandchildren "epsilons squared," alcohol "poison," music "noise," and women "bosses," an inversion of what Hungarian women often called their husbands. "Give me an epsilon of poison," Erdos would say when he wanted a sip of wine. "Wine, women, and song" became "Poison, bosses, and noise."



  He then had a huge argument with the surgeon about why, since only one eye was being deadened [during his cornea transplant], he couldn't read a mathematics journal with the other, good eye. The surgeon made a series of frantic calls to the Memphis math department. "Can you send a mathematician over here at once so that Erdos can talk math during surgery?" The department obliged, and the operation went smoothly.



Unfortunately only half of this is anecdotes about Erdős, the rest being the usual potted-history of quirky mathematicians (Archimedes the oblivious, Fermat the executioner, Gauss the crabbed, Hardy the dry eccentric, Ramanujan the sublime, Wiles the Stakhanovite) with the usual stories. I skimmed these bits to get more of the good stuff.

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth

Reviews