Review:The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

Well, Jon Katz has sent in his first book review, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, written by Paul Hoffman. This is literary tribute to the life and work of Paul Erdos, the eminent mathematician that died last year. Click below to read more about a true geek.

When they build the Geek Hall of Fame, in some musty corner of MIT or in a dingey loft in San Francisco's Mission District, there surely will be a corner reserved to honor the mythic mathematician Paul Erdos, whose odd and poignant life is vividly captured in the "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers," by Paul Hoffman (Hyperion, US $22.95).

Erdos, who died in l996, was one of the greatest mathematicians of the century, as well as a profound eccentric. Almost pure geek, he lived for decades out of two battered suitcases, frenetically criss-crossing the world, giving lectures, attacking problems, furiously publishing papers, and unnerving the friends he dropped in on unexpectedly.

If geeks are reputed to have few social skills, Erdos had none. He took the obsessive pursuit of knowledge to breathaking levels. He was allergic to amassing wealth, giving what little money he had to strangers, beggars and promising young students. He had no job, hobbies or home to tie him down. He was also unmarried, celibate and childless.

According to Hoffman, Erdos thought about more problems than any other mathematician in history. He wrote or co-authored 1,475 academic papers, many of them monumentally significant.

His life was the pure pursuit of the beauty, truth and knowledge he found in numbers. Mathematicians have long argued that numbers are about the only thing that can't lie or dissassemble. Erdos saw math as nothing less than the search for ultimate truth.

So he spent his life seeking out fresh problems to solve, hop-scotching continents, popping up on the doorsteps of fellow mathematicians to announce, "My brain is open," then staying to work with his hosts for a few days or until he got bored, meanwhile littering their homes with the potions and powders he used for his many skin ailments. Erdos' motto was "another roof, another proof."

He chafed at being pushed around by an omnipotent being he called the Supreme Fascist, says Hoffman, "the Number-One Guy Up There, God, who was always tormenting Erdos by hiding his glasses, stealing his Hungarian passport, or, worse yet, keeping to Himself the elegant solutions to all sorts of intriguing mathematical problems."

Erdos would frequently tell his friends that the SF "created us to enjoy our suffering. The sooner we die, the sooner we defy his plans."

Until then, though, Erdos worked on groundbreaking problems like Fermat's Last Theorem, and uniquely American ones like the "Monty Hall dilemma."

The Monty Hall dilemma is one of the many surprising, often hilarious glimpses of the odd nature of genius that Hoffman offers in this unexpectedly poignant book. Some of Erdos' prodigious gifts intersected with the popular culture in a distinctly American way.

"My only advice"-Monty Hall, host of the popular TV game show called "Let's Make A Deal," once told a guest, -- "is, if you can get me to offer you $5,000 not to open the door, take the money and run."

In a l990, Parade Magazine columnist Marilyn vos Savant, author of "The World's Most Famous Math Problem," shared with her readers a brain teaser submitted by a reader:

"You're on a game show and you're given the choce of three doors. Behind one door is a car, behind the other two are goats. You choose, say, door 1, and the host, who knows where the car is, opens another door, behind which is a goat. He now gives you the choice of sticking with door 1 or switching to the other door? What should you do?"

Vos Savant advised her correspondent to switch doors. Sticking with the first choice gives a one-third chance of winning, she said, but switching doubles the odds to two-thirds.

The resulting furor and controversy (imagine if the Internet had been in full bloom) over her mathematical reasoning obsessed geeks, TV viewers, contestants and math geniuses alike-eventually ensnaring even the great Erdos, who came across it at a friend's house.

To me, Erdos embodied the touching heart of pure geekness. An outsider, he never found a place to light. An obsessive, he foreswore wealth and creature comforts in favor of the pursuit of the beauty of information and truth. A grumpy rebel, he resisted and bristled at authority and any other entity that might come between him and the solutions he worked on day and night.

Generous with his genius, he transcended boundares, sharing everything he knew with everyone he met, with a special eye towards lifting up and encouraging the young. Before he'd consent to go under the knife during an eye operation, the doctors had to find a mathematician who'd talk numbers with him during the proceedure. If he was often impossible to be around, ill-tempered, self-absorbed and narcissistic, he enriched the world in immense and measurable ways. Erdos was suspicious of technology, and had little love for computers, but was awash with one of the geek's hallmark traits-an addiction for attacking puzzles, breaking intellectual barriers and gathering information.

A life as lonely and disconnected as Erdos's might strike us as a sad one. But as lovingly and engagingly recounted by Hoffman, Erdos's life is anything but. Adopted and embraced by a global community of scholars, friends and colleagues who took him in, clothed and fed him, drove him to the next aiport, and welcomed him into their lives.

That there might be other people like Erdos out there, willing and eager to forego most human warmth and material comfort in the pursuit of truth and wisdom is, as told here, and inspiring, even hopeful story. Buy this at Amazon and help Slashdot out.