Man Who Only Loved Numbers, the - Paul Hoffman

Can you name any practising mathematicians? Unlike the world of theoretical physics, which can boast household names like Steven Hawking, maths is seen as a closed and arcane world. Asked to name a mathematician most people are likely to name Pythagoras and Euclid rather than someone like Andrew Wiles, who finally cracked Fermat’s Last Theorem and was the subject of several books and TV programs. All of this is a shame, of course, because it’s mathematics which drives the work of theoretical physicists. Paul Erdos was one of the most prolific and inventive mathematicians of the twentieth century. In many ways he was the archetypal ‘nutty ...