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Loading... The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for…by Paul HoffmanLibraryThing recommendationsMember recommendationsLoading...
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. A fun biography of Paul Erdos, one of the most prolific (and eccentric!) mathematicians of all time. (  ) byorgey | Nov 4, 2009 |  Eminently Fascinating: Having stopped learning math in high school, competent, but not excellent at it, this book was a great romp of mathematical trivia. As a biography it is a little scattered in focus, but the life of Paul Erdos was befitting of such an approach. One of the great minds in the history of math, more published than almost any other, thinking things only a handful of others could grasp, Erdos was a personification of the absent-minded thinker. Which could sometimes make for a hard subject to write the life of. Having never heard of Erdos until I read this book, it proved to be a competent and entertaining book about the man's life and quirks and some of his ideas. But the true strength of this book is its branching out into the ideas of the world of mathematics. Taking asides that last ten pages or more, Paul Hoffman explores the foundations and revolutions and some of the quirkier trivia tidbits of the world of mathematics. Making this work as much a fun romp through the interesting parts of math and part biography of a quixotic man who lived math. I have heard there is another biography of Erdos out there that deals more directly with his life and ideas, and if one were looking for a more focused biography, it would probably be a better choice. But The Man Who Loved Only Numbers is a great read for its insight and entertainment value. Yes, it made math fun, and for the most part understandable. 2  iayork | Aug 9, 2009 | Not Read  wlchui | Aug 2, 2009 | Hilarious and quotable -- at least if you were a math major. I have no idea how people not steeped in math culture would relate to this book, but for me, it was a charming tour of familiar territory, and a good set of anecdotes about the greatest mathematician of recent memory. ( ) Andromeda_Yelton | Apr 19, 2009 | In many ways, this was two thirds a biography of Erdős and one third a random aggregation of mathematical anecdotes. It's a lovely book; an affectionately written study of a very unusual figure, which admittedly glides quite lightly over his mathematics but nonetheless manages to give the impression of having explained things. This isn't a defect, I think; it's explicitly written as a popular work, and that's probably about the level you want, engaging but not overwhelming. It would have been a lot shorter had it focused simply on Erdős - it went into quite some depth on some of his close collaborators, which seemed a bit of a lengthy digression at times. On the other hand, this would have meant we didn't get the lovely portraits of mathematics in pre-war Hungary, which was remarkably fun. As for the random anecdotes... well, I liked them. But so many of them I'd read here or there before; it was occasionally somewhat repetitive simply because the stories it was telling were so common, and crop up in almost every book that could find an excuse to shoehorn them in. On the whole, a pleasant book; it managed to bring out the strangeness of his life without trivialising it, and displayed a real respect and love for its subject. shimgray | Jan 22, 2009 |  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0786863625, Hardcover)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 math problems than anyone in history. Like a traveling 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 a genius's life that 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 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 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 (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:10 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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