Paul Erdos was an amazing and prolific mathematician whose life as a world-wandering numerical nomad was legendary He published almost scholarly papers before his death in and he probably thought more about math problems than anyone in history Like a traveling salesman offering his thoughts as wares Erdos would show up on the doorstep of one mathematician or another and announce My brain is open After working through a problem hed move on to the next place the next solution Hoffmans book like Sylvia Nasars biography of John Nash A Beautiful Mind reveals a geniuss life that transcended the merely quirky But Erdoss brand of madness was joyful unlike Nashs despairing schizophrenia Erdos 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 Erdos A mathematical genius of the first order Paul Erdos 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 Its 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 Erdos over the last 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 Erdos is no doubt missed --Therese Littleton.
