Rating: 
Summary: Very enjoyable read.
Review: This book is a fascinating look at mathematics and a man who devoted his life to solving problems. The author has made the book very accessible to non-mathematical readers. The most enjoyable sections are those that deal with the personality of Erdos. He was such a strange, eccentric and brilliant individual. His passion is conveyed very well by the text. While the book has not yet inspired me to solve any great problems, it has left me with a better appreciation for one of the great minds of our century.
Rating: 
Summary: You'll be hearing about this one...
Review: Inspiring, moving, funny. This easy-reading book will give you insight to one of our greatest mathematicians.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining, educational and accessable. Very good.
Review: As someone who will freely admit that their grasp of mathematics is lacking, I'd like to say how accessable this book made the the diverse, complex subjects that Erdos dealt with on a daily basis. I found the chatty and slightly meandering approach that Hoffman has adopted to be very absorbing, and created a page turner that I for one, would not typically associate with a biographical work. Other reviewers have commented on the digression that occurs in a negative light, and compared the book to a fatted magazine article. Numerous subjects are given brief coverage either as a way of providing background on particular problems, or as a way of introducing those other academics who collaborated with Erdos. In my opinion this doesn't detract from the book in the slightest, rather it helps the uninformed reader grasp a piece of the bigger picture. All up, highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Fascinating character study with uneven digressions
Review: This is a fascinating study of Paul Erdos, one of the century's great mathematicians and also one of its great eccentrics. As long as Hoffman focuses on Erdos--his life, his personality, and his work-- the book is riveting. Unfortunately, Hoffman frequently shifts his focus to other contemporary mathematicians, and Erdos disappears from the book for whole chapters at a time. These digressions are often interesting, but they are also annoying. You can't wait for Erdos to come back. Highly recommended for those parts.
Rating:
Summary: A biography of a man who hardly had a life
Review: There were so few events in the life of Erdos that a conventional biography in which the subject's inner life and external exploits are detailed is clearly impossible. This book is best described as a mathematical-life history. It gives the reader the flavor of mathematical research pursued with single-minded intensity.
Rating:
Summary: Hoffman is a conjurer who brings Erdos alive.
Review: I have known Paul Erdos since 1930. My Erdos Number is 1, and I am one those traitors to mathematics whom Erdos designated as dead, although I "never lost the touch". Paul Hoffman is a conjurer who puts Erdos next to the reader's elbow. The world is full of ugliness, cruelty, and wickedness. Erdos was an icon: totally selfless, caring, idealistic. Also, he was a good mathematician. If you are under the misapprehension that all mathematicians are cold fish, read Hoffman.
Rating:
Summary: Playful prose
Review: After Kay Jamison gave this a glowing endorsement on the front page of the Washington Post book review, I decided to read Hoffman's book. What a treat! I liked learning about Erdos and the passion with which he did mathematics. I also like the exhuberance with which Hoffman writes. He is clearly turned on by math, and his clear, exciting prose turned me on. This is not a straight-ahead biography but more of an idiosyncratic, impressionistic take on a uniquely strange individual. Hoffman pulls it off.
Rating: 
Summary: This book is okay, but flawed in many ways.
Review: Hoffman is certainly right that Erdos was fascinating, but so much of this book is filled up with stuff that has nothing to do with Erdos. I think the New Scientist was right to say that this book shows signs of being a magazine article bulked up at great speed into a book. The New Scientist was also right that the Erdos biography by Bruce Schechter, "My Brain Is Open," is far better written and gives a much better sense of Erdos the human being as well as Erdos the mathematician. A big disappointment. Schechter's book shows that Hoffman did a lazy job and relied on the strong personality of his subject --rather than good and careful writing-- to supply any interest this book has.
Rating:
Summary: Captures the soul of one of mathematics' great eccentrics
Review: Paul Erdos was an eccentric genius who never bothered to acquire a home or a wife or an income, but traveled around the world living out of two suitcases that contained everything he had. He would stay with other mathematicians, thinking and talking about math for hours, as he developed the ideas which he published in more than 1,000 papers over his lifetime. Because of his genius and his joy in pursuing it, he was a welcome guest. The author, Paul Hoffman, manages to give a sense of how Erdos, despite his great powers, operated under terrible constraints. He spoke in a sort of eccentric baby talk which he developed as a way of concealing his political beliefs while growing up in Communist Hungary. His closest relationship as an adult was with his mother, who had instilled in him a lifelong fear of contagion. He had no interest in art, food, or sex -- yet as Oliver Sacks says in a jacket note, there was great joy in his strange life. Hoffman, an experienced science writer, gives some of the flavor of Erdos' discoveries in number theory without resorting to crude oversimplification. One of the best scientific biographies I've ever read; on a par with "Longitude."
Rating:
Summary: Reads like a bulked up magazine article
Review: Paul Hoffman wrote an award-winning article on Erdos many years ago. I have to agree with the New Scientist, which said that his book on Erdos is like a bulked up magazine article. It's a fun read, but sloppy, poorly structured, riddled with "filler"-type digressions, and often rambling and disjointed. The other Erdos Biography, My Brain Is Open: The Mathematical Journeys of Paul Erdos (Simon & Schuster), by Bruce Schechter, is far superior. It has all the fun of Hoffman's book, but Schechter doesn't lose the reader with a lot of puffy digressions and he stays focused on Erdos's life and work rather than boring the reader with inconsequential facts. I also don't like the way Hoffman puts himself into the narrative of his book, telling us in the first person how he (Hoffman) feels about various issues. This was supposed to be a book about Erdos, not Hoffman, and Hoffman wasn't even a bit player in Erdos's life, so why does Hoffman think it's important to tell us about himself throughout the book? It's rather tedious and distracting to hear him say "I" all the time in a book that's not about him in any way (or shouldn't be). I would definitely point the reader to Schechter's book for a far better bio of Erdos, one which doesn't just take a core magazine portrait and bulk it up but which was written from scratch by a fine writer who has mastered the material. In short, Hoffman's book is fun but flawed. Schechter's book is the one to buy and read.
|
