October 11, 2005
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: the Story of Paul Erdös and the Search for Mathematical Truth by Paul Hoffmann
Paul Erdös was easily the most prolific mathematician of the 20th century. Part of this reason was that he did almost nothing else: he spent all his time engrossed in mathematics. He ingested the strongest coffee and addictive levels of amphetamines to ensure that he was continually alert to the possibility of a new theorem even with only three hours of sleep every day. He never married or even had to the best of anybody's knowledge any romantic feelings for anything other than prime numbers and graph theory. In a field of strange geniuses, Erdös was stranger and more of a genius than most.
He wrote or co-authored 1,475 academic papers, many of them monumental, and all of them substantial.
While Erdös' life and his work are fascinating, only the former gets adequate attention in this book. His curious behaviour and his homeland Hungary get a lot of attention by Hoffmann. The history of Hungary in the early 20th century provides a backdrop to the story of Erdös and his family who were Hungarian Jews during a time (as everyone knows) when it not so convenient to be Jewish in Europe.
While Hoffmann selects prime number theory and goes into its history and Erdös' contributions to this field in great depth, Hoffmann all but ignores the tremendous contributions of Erdös to random graphs and Ramsey theory. The latter is mentioned and discussed in the book, but is not covered in the depth that it deserved.
Instead, Hoffmann gets distracted by the colorful personalities of many of Erdös' academic collaborators. Even historical figures in mathematics that formed some of the foundations of the field are covered even though they have but tangential connections to the work of Erdös (their work might have deep connections, but they do so to the work of all mathematicians, and so their selection here is simply opportunistic). The work of Gauss is covered suitably for his proof of the Prime Number Theorem (a theorem about the log-like distribution of prime numbers). This was a theorem for which Erdös and Selberg gave a simpler proof than the original by Gauss. Other mathematicians such as Cantor get a lot of coverage in this book, sometimes not for very good reasons.
Despite these shortcomings, Hoffmann does a good job in introducing the intuitions behind the practice of number theory in mathematics.
It should be noted that the reviewer has an Erdös number of 4.
%T The Man Who Loved Only Numbers %T :the Story of Paul Erdös and the Search for Mathematical Truth %A Paul Hoffmann %I Fourth Estate, London %D 1998 %G ISBN: 1857028112 (pb) %P 302 %K mathematics, biography
Review written: 2002/02/22
Posted by anoop at October 11, 2005 12:05 PM