The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (1998)

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/h/hoffman-man.html

by ttsiodras • 12 years ago

149 29 12 years ago

BinRoo• 12 years ago

My High School mathematics teacher introduced me to this book 6-7 years ago. Erdös was a hacker in the Mathematician's world. His throughput for establishing hundreds of conjectures and proofs reminds me of collegiate Hackathons in our programming community. This book might make you fall in love with Mathematics, or at least provide an undeniable appreciation for getting shit done.

japhyr2• 12 years ago

There's a children's book called The Boy Who Loved Math: The improbable life of Paul Erdös [0]. I ordered a copy when looking for some books to get my son interested in math beyond counting and simple arithmetic.

My son is 3 1/2, and he loves this book. He loves that there was a kid who loved numbers so much he spent his whole life studying them. He loves that he gets to see a boy grow into an adult, who grows into an old man. If you want to share your love of math with a kid, Erdös' story is a great one to share. It's also a great conversation starter about how much or how little to focus on any one thing. I love knowing Erdös' story, but I'm not sure I'd like to be him.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/The-Boy-Who-Loved-Math/dp/1596433078/r...

GuiA• 12 years ago

If you're looking for math books for kids, I highly recommend "The Cat in Numberland". It's an illustrated story that touches upon the different kinds of infinities, and even describes Cantor's diagonalization argument in a very friendly, intuitive way. Most adults would also benefit from reading this book.

It's out of print, but might be found at your local library or bought used on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/The-Cat-Numberland-Ivar-Ekeland/dp/081...).

hueving• 12 years ago

Does it cover the cocaine usage?

japhyr2• 12 years ago

The only substance it mentions is coffee.

teddyh2• 12 years ago

The name is most correctly spelled “Paul Erdős”, not “Paul Erdös”.

robinhouston• 12 years ago

More correctly, certainly; most correctly might be “Erdős Pál”?

teddyh2• 12 years ago

I stand most corrected.

miles• 12 years ago

There is a documentary about his life as well:

N Is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iflQseSSfA

temuze• 12 years ago

Oh man, I really loved this biography in the 9th grade. It was the first time I was exposed to the concept of mathematics being beautiful. I can't recommend this book enough. Also, I loved Paul Hoffman's biography of the Brazilian aviator Alberto Santos Dumont as well.

grannyg00se• 12 years ago

I find it fascinating that, according to this story, he could not be productive without amphetamines.

"I'd have no ideas, just like an ordinary person. "

ZoF• 12 years ago

Keep in mind that he didn't start amphetamine use until his late 50's.

cma• 12 years ago

I read it as he couldn't be productive during a month of intense amphetamine withdrawal

Gravityloss• 12 years ago

Anybody notice how beautiful and natural to use the page is? Turns out it's very basic html.

endgame• 12 years ago

Very refreshing.

arasmussen• 12 years ago

I don't have a huge monitor (22 inches) but I found it difficult to read because the lines were so wide. They should set a fixed width for the content and then I'd agree with you.

lmm2• 12 years ago

They shouldn't. If you want to make a wide page narrower you can always resize your browser. If I want to make a narrow page wider, there's no way for me to do that.

glifchits• 12 years ago

One thing I like to do with Chrome is open the web inspector and set "max-width: 800px; margin: 0 auto" to the root html tag on sites like this.

theflubba• 12 years ago

He seemed to also love amphetamines.

xg• 12 years ago

I love that this story is trending on Hacker News. The author, Paul Hoffman, is a close friend.

It's nice when good work gets rediscovered here.

steego• 12 years ago

Thank your friend for writing a wonderful biography about a beautiful soul. That book really opened up the world for me by introducing me to a lot of the history and ideas. I'd dropped out of school many years ago and never learned Calculus. After that book, I was inspired to take evening classes and finally learn calculus. As it turned out, I needed to take a few refresher classes before I got to calculus, but I did and I finished up to calc 3. I've been meaning to go back and do some linear algebra and differential equations... Hopefully, I will go back soon.

Tell your friend he's doing the SF's work. Then again, maybe he's doing the devil's work if the SF is bent on keeping all the good theorems to himself.

leephillips• 12 years ago

A couple of years after this article a book about Erdős appeared called My Brain is Open. If you enjoyed this article I highly recommend the book about this fascinating man and his unique life. It even has some good explanations of some of the problems he worked on.

The information about amphetamines made an impression. His friends at times tried to discourage him, but he claimed that without them, he could create no mathematics. Given his colossal output, this means that a significant part of the landscape of modern mathematics owes it existence to this drug.

How he learned the drug would help him, and how he got his hands on it, and when and how his use of it started, are questions I'm very curious about, but the book doesn't go there.

Curmudgel• 12 years ago

The information about amphetamines made an impression. His friends at times tried to discourage him, but he claimed that without them, he could create no mathematics. Given his colossal output, this means that a significant part of the landscape of modern mathematics owes it existence to this drug.

Erdős was a heavy user of many other stimulants (like coffee), but only started to use antidepressants and then amphetamines in 1971 when he was 58 after his mother died. He was already established as a first rate mathematician (he should have won the Fields Medal), and using amphetamines to work 19 hours a day was his way of coping with the death of his mother.

See http://www.untruth.org/~josh/math/Paul%20Erd%F6s%20bio-rev2.... for more.

cschmidt• 12 years ago

I loved this book, and can highly recommend it. Take a look at the bottom right picture on his Wikipedia page [1], where he is talking about math to a 10 year old Terence Tao, who is now one of the great minds of his generation. I think that is Erdos in short. He had an influence on so many people across the world.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s

lkozma• 12 years ago

If someone is interested, here are two further nice articles about the man, written by a close friend and collaborator:

http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/files/tr_authentic/TR-2001-11.ps

http://www.cs.uchicago.edu/files/tr_authentic/TR-2001-03.ps

The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (1998)

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