The Man Who Loved Only Numbers
by Paul Hoffman
Summary
Paul Erdős owned almost nothing, traveling for decades out of a suitcase, with no house, no job and no family of his own. For most of the twentieth century he simply travelled, arriving at the doors of mathematicians on four continents with the announcement that his brain was open, staying until the theorems ran out, then moving on. He wrote or co wrote around 1,500 papers, more than any mathematician in history, fueled from 1971 onward by amphetamines he defended as a professional necessity, and by coffee behind his friend Alfréd Rényi's famous line that a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.
Hoffman's biography, built from years of interviews with Erdős and the friends who fed, housed, laundered and collaborated with him, is a portrait of pure vocation. Erdős could not butter toast, open a milk carton or drive, held property and small talk in equal contempt, spoke his own dialect in which children were epsilons and God was the Supreme Fascist who hid the best proofs, and gave away nearly every dollar he earned, prize money included, to students and beggars. Around him Hoffman sketches the mathematics, primes, Ramsey theory, the probabilistic method, at friendly altitude, along with the community's affectionate accounting system, the Erdős number, which measures every mathematician's distance from the centre by co authorship.
The tenderness is earned: the kindness stories outnumber the eccentricity stories.
Around three hundred pages.
Best for readers who want the strangest and most likeable life in modern science, and mathematics presented as what Erdős knew it to be, a communal art.
Historical Context & Significance
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers won the Science Book Prize in 1999, defeating, among others, E. O. Wilson, and it stands with Sylvia Nasar's A Beautiful Mind, published the same year, at the head of the modern mathematical biography boom. Hoffman had been circling the subject for over a decade: his 1987 Atlantic profile of Erdős won the National Magazine Award, and the book expands it with the material of Erdős's last years, he died mid conference in 1996, at a mathematics meeting in Warsaw, very nearly as he had hoped.
The Erdős number meanwhile completed its escape into general culture, the model for every collaborative distance game since, Bacon numbers included.
Paul Hoffman, sometime president of Encyclopaedia Britannica, wrote it as oral history, and the mathematicians' own voices, Ronald Graham above all, running Erdős's finances from a room in his house, give the book its warmth; the community largely embraced it as the portrait of their saint.