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Planning an Infinite Stay

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ost people think mathematicians are a world apart, speaking strange words, writing strange symbols, cerebral beings not quite connected with day-to-day life. If truth be told, strange words and symbols notwithstanding, most of us are rather conventional people with conventional lives: mortgages, families, school systems, workplace bureaucracies. Naturally then, those singular individuals who are unconventional while making prized contributions to the discipline become legendary. No mathematician is more legendary than Paul Erdös (1913-96). Erdös could be read as a tragic, seriously ill figure. He always depended on the kindness of colleagues. A pampered prodigy and mama's boy who did not butter his own bread until the age of 21 (and then marveled at how easy it was), he owned virtually nothing, shunned employment, fretted preternaturally about senility (or death, which was the same to him). He presumed to impose on others for transportation, clean clothes, shelter and food. He asked pe

Planning an Infinite Stay September 27, 1998 Planning an Infinite Stay The mathematician Paul Erdös was a man with no fixed address. Related Link First Chapter: 'The Man Who Loved Only Numbers' By JAMES ALEXANDER THE MAN WHO LOVED ONLY NUMBERS The Story of Paul Erdös and the Search for Mathematical Truth. By Paul Hoffman. Illustrated. 302 pp. New York: Hyperion. $22.95. ost people think mathematicians are a world apart, speaking strange words, writing strange symbols, cerebral beings not quite connected with day-to-day life. If truth be told, strange words and symbols notwithstanding

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