The Man Who Loved Only Numbers - The Story of Paul Erdos [mathematician

335 Pages·1998·13.15 MB·English

by  Paul Hoffman

THE MAN VVHO LOVED
ONLY NUMBERS
THE STORY
"
OF PAUL ERDOS AND
THE SEARCH
FOR MATHEMATICAL
TRUTH
BY PAUL HOFFMAN
FOURTH ESTATE. LONDON
This paperback edition published in 1999
First published in Great Britain in 1998 by
Fourth Estate Limited
6 Salem Road
London W2 40BU
Copyright © Paul Hoffman 1998
5 7 9 10 8 6 4
The right of Paul Hoffman to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 1-86702-829-5
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or
stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in
writing from Fourth Estate Limited.
Text design by Dorothy S. Baker
Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives pIc
The author is grateful for permission from: THE CANADIAN BROADCASTING
CORPORATION to excerpt outtakes from the radio program "Math and Aftermath: A
Tribute to Donald Coxeter," broadcast on the series Ideas on May 13, 1997. The program
featured Ideas host Lister Sinclair and was produced by SaraWolch; RONALD GRAHAM,
EDGAR PALMER, AND GORDON RAISBECK to excerpt e-mail and snail mail to Ronald
Graham; TOM TROTTER AND RICHARD GUY to excerpt recollections of Paul Erd~s
that were posted on the Web; WILLIAM WEBB to excerpt Paul Erdos's "Child Prodigies"
(March 1971) in James Jordan and William A. Webb, editors, Proceedings if the
Washington State University Conference on Number Theory (DepartmentofMathematics
and Pi Mu Epsilon, Washington State University, Pullman, Washington); PARADE
MAGAZINE and MARILYN VOS SAVANT to excerpt from "Ask Marilyn" columns of
September 9, 1990, December 2, 1990, and February 17, 1991; THE CARTOON BANK
to quote from a © 1998 cartoon by Robert Mankoff; FABER AND FABER LTD to
excerpt fromArcadia by Tom Stoppard. Author's failure to obtain a necessarypermission
for the use of any other copyrighted material included in this work is inadvertent and
will be corrected in future printings of the work.
To Pali bacsi,
der Zauberer von Budapest,
who got by with a little help from his friends
and achieved immortality with his proofs and conjectures
To Ron,
who made the last 39.76 percent of Paul's life easier
and gave generously of his time in helping me
understand Paul's world
To Ann,
who loves frogs, poetry, and me

CONTENTS
o
THE TWO-AND-A-HALF-BILLION-YEAR-OLD MAN 3
1
STRAIGHT FROM THE BOOK 25
2
EPSZI'S ENIGMA 59
e
PROBLEMS WITH SAM AND JOE 95
3
EINSTEIN VS. DOSTOYEVSKY 131
1t
DR. WORST CASE 145
4
MARGINAL REVENGE 179
5
,,GOD MADE THE INTE G E RS ' , 203
CONTENTS
6
GETTING THE GOAT 233
7
SURV I V0 RS' PART Y 247
00
"WE MATHEMATICIANS ARE ALL
A LITTLE BIT CRAZY" 263
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS AND SOURCE NOTES 269
BIBLIOGRAPHY 279
INDEX 289
Mathematical truth is immutable; it lies outside
physical reality.... This is our belief; this is
our core motivating force. Yet our attempts to
describe this belief to our nonmathematical
friends are akin to describing the Almighty to
an atheist. Paul embodied this belief in math
ematical truth. His enormous talents and ener
gies were given entirely to the Temple of
Mathematics. He harbored no doubts about the
importance, the absoluteness, of his quest. To
see his faith was to be given faith. The religious
world might better have understood Paul's
special personal qualities. We knew him as
Uncle Paul.
-Joel Spencer
To find another life this century as intensely
devoted to abstraction, one must reach back
to Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), who
stripped his life bare for philosophy. But
whereas Wittgenstein discarded his family for
tune as a form of self-torture, Mr. Erdos gave
away most of the money he earned because he
simply did not need it.... And where Wittgen
stein was driven by near suicidal compulsions,
Mr. Erdos simply constructed his life to extract
the maximum amount of happiness.
-The Economist

THE MAN WHO LOVED
ONLY NUMBERS