the man who loved only numbers by paul hoffman

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. 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. 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. 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.

Erdos never tried to dilute his obsessive passion for numbers with ordinary emotional interactions, thus avoiding hurting the people around him, as Nash did. But Erdos’s brand of madness was joyful, unlike Nash’s despairing schizophrenia. Hoffman’s book, like Sylvia Nasar’s biography of John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, reveals a genius’s life that transcended the merely quirky.

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. He published almost 1500 scholarly papers before his death in 1996, and he probably thought more about math problems than anyone in history. Paul Erdos was an amazing and prolific mathematician whose life as a world-wandering numerical nomad was legendary.

The man who loved only numbers by paul hoffman