The Man Who Loved Only Numbers
essay by Paul Hoffman
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers is a biography of mathematician Paul Erdős written by Paul Hoffman. The book was first published on July 15, 1998, by Hyperion Books as a hardcover edition. A paperback edition appeared in 1999. The book is, in the words of the author, "a work in oral history based on the recollections of Erdős, his collaborators and their spouses". The book was a bestseller in the United Kingdom and has been published in 15 different languages. The book won the 1999 Rhône-Poulenc Prize, beating many distinguished and established writers, including E. O. Wilson.
How the book came about
Hoffman received an assignment by The Atlantic Monthly in 1987 to profile Erdős, which won the National Magazine Award for feature writing. After this, Hoffman followed Erdős on his travels for the last 10 years of his life learning about his exceedingly unusual life and interviewing his numerous collaborators in the process of writing this book.
Content
A large part of the book concerns Erdős, but a lot of it is about other mathematicians, past and present, including Ronald Graham, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and G.H. Hardy. In the book, Erdős enjoys listening to Hardy when he speaks about Ramanujan.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Man Who Loved Only Numbers” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.