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Informationen zum Autor Paul Hoffman is the publisher of ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica’. He is the host of the five-part PBS series ‘Great Minds of Science’ and a frequent correspondent on television shows such as ‘CBS This Morning’ and ‘The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.’ For ten years, Hoffman was the president and editor-in-chief of ‘Discover’ magazine. He is the author of ten books including ‘Archimedes’ Revenge.’ He lives in Chicago, Illinois and Woodstock, New York. Klappentext Paul Erdös, the most prolific and eccentric mathematician of our times, forsook all creature comforts – including a home – to pursue his lifelong study of numbers. He was a man who possessed unimaginable powers of thought, yet was unable to manage some of the simplest daily tasks. For more than six decades Erdös lived out of two tattered suitcases, criss-crossing four continents at a frenzied pace, chasing mathematical problems. He gave his love to numbers – and they returned in kind, 'revealing their secrets to him as they did to no other mathematician of this century' (Life magazine). Erdös saw mathematics as a search for lasting beauty and ultimate truth. It was a search he never abandoned, even as his life was torn asunder by some of the major political dramas of our time: the Communist revolution in his native Hungary, the rise of Nazism, the Cold War and McCarthyism. In this brilliantly inventive and playful biography, Hoffman uses Erdös's life and work to introduce readers to a cast of remarkable geniuses, from Archimedes to Stanislaw Ulam, one of the chief minds behind the Los Alamos nuclear project. He draws on years of interviews with Ronald Graham and Fan Chung, Erdos's chief American caretakers and devoted collaborators. With an eye for the hilarious anecdote, Hoffman explains mathematical problems from Fermat's Last Theorem to the more frivolous 'Monty Hall Problem'. What emerges is an intimate look at the world of mathematics and an indelible portrait of Erdös, a charming and impish philosopher-scientist whose accomplishments continue to enrich and inform our world. Zusammenfassung The biography of a mathematical genius. Paul Erdos was the most prolific pure mathematician in history and, arguably, the strangest too....
