Rating: 
Summary: N is a Number: True Story of the Travelling Mathematician
Review: +++++
The four-word title of this book is "My Brain Is Open." If you keep the first word and form a word from the first letter of the three remaining words, you get "My BIO." And that's exactly what this book is. This ten chapter book, by Dr. Bruce Schechter, is a BIOgraphy of Dr. Paul Erdos (pronounced "Air-dish").
Erdos (1913 to 1996) is said to have been one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century (especially in number theory, the branch of math concerned with the properties of integers) as well as the most eccentric. Throughout this book, we also learn of the many others who collaborated with Erdos on his many published mathematical papers. (He wrote or collaborated on more than 1500 papers with over 450 collaborators.)
This book is also filled with the sorts of mathematical puzzles that intrigued Erdos and continue to fascinate mathematicians today. Schechter does a good job of explaining these puzzles (with the aid of diagrams, tables, and graphs) so the reader does not have to worry that these problems will be too difficult to understand.
The reader is also taken on a tour of mathematics. We are introduced to such people as Pythagoras and his famous theorem; Karl Gauss who, when ten years old, was able to add up the numbers from 1 to 100 in less than half a minute; and Bernhard Reimann and his work on prime numbers.
Erdos was born in Hungry. By age seventeen he had gained international recognition as a prodigy. He eventually left Hungry and went to the Institute of Advanced Study at Princton in the United States. (Einstein was the institutes most famous resident then.) Because of his politics, he was exiled from the U.S. for a decade. From this point beginning in the 1950s, he became "the Bob Hope of mathematics" or "the travelling mathematician."
Since Erdos was constantly travelling, he had no home or job but still managed to meet with math colleagues all over the world. He had all his belongings in a suitcase and his mathematical papers in a bag when he arrived at their homes. Erdos also depended on the generosity of colleagues to sustain him.
The reader is introduced to Erdos' eccentricities throughout the book. For example, he invented a vocabulary where the U.S. was "Sam" or "Samland" (after Uncle Sam) and the Soviet Union was "Joe" or "Joedom" (after Josef Stalin).
There are more than fifteen black and white photographs found in the middle of this book. These photos span a period from 1916 to 1993.
To get the information needed to write this book, Schechter relied "on the memories of the many people" who met Erdos -- his hundreds of collaborators and friends. That is, he "primarily relied on interviews with many of the people who knew Erdos best." Schechter also "drew heavily" from biographical essays as well as magazine articles about Erdos. He also used the information from the over ninety sources listed in this book's bibliography.
Finally, as I said above, this book does contain mathematical puzzles that intrigued Erdos. Personally, I found these interesting but some readers may find that they interfere with the flow of the book. As well, mathematicians who read this book may question the accuracy of a few of the mathematical concepts that are introduced.
In conclusion, this book invites the reader into the wacky world of mathematical genius Paul Erdos. If you're like me, you'll find this book both comical and enlightening!!
+++++.
Rating:
Summary: N is a Number: True Story of the Travelling Mathematician
Review: =====>The four-word title of this book is "My Brain Is Open." If you keep the first word and form a word from the first letter of the three remaining words, you get "My BIO." And that's exactly what this book is. This ten chapter book, by Dr. Bruce Schechter, is a BIOgraphy of Dr. Paul Erdos (pronounced "Air-dish"). Erdos (1913 to 1996) is said to have been one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century (especially in number theory, the branch of math concerned with the properties of integers) as well as the most eccentric. Throughout this book, we also learn of the many others who collaborated with Erdos on his many published mathematical papers. (He wrote or collaborated on more than 1500 papers with over 450 collaborators.) This book is also filled with the sorts of mathematical puzzles that intrigued Erdos and continue to fascinate mathematicians today. Schechter does a good job of explaining these puzzles (with the aid of diagrams, tables, and graphs) so the reader does not have to worry that these problems will be too difficult to understand. The reader is also taken on a tour of mathematics. We are introduced to such people as Pythagoras and his famous theorem, Karl Gauss who, when ten years old, was able to add up the numbers from 1 to 100 in less than half a minute, and Bernhard Reimann and his work on prime numbers. Erdos was born in Hungry. By age seventeen he had gained international recognition as a prodigy. He eventually left Hungry and went to the Institute of Advanced Study at Princton in the United States. (Einstein was the institutes most famous resident then.) Because of his politics, he was exiled from the U.S. for a decade. From this point beginning in the 1950s, he became "the Bob Hope of mathematics" or "the travelling mathematician." Since Erdos was constantly travelling, he had no home or job but still managed to meet with math colleagues all over the world. He had all his belongings in a suitcase and his mathematical papers in a bag when he arrived at their homes. Erdos also depended on the generosity of colleagues to sustain him. The reader is introduced to Erdos' eccentricities throughout the book. For example, he invented a vocabulary where the U.S. was "Sam" or "Samland" (after Uncle Sam) and the Soviet Union was "Joe" or "Joedom" (after Josef Stalin). There are more than fifteen black and white photographs found in the middle of this book. These photos span a period from 1916 to 1993. To get the information needed to write this book, Schechter relied "on the memories of the many people" who met Erdos -- his hundreds of collaborators and friends. That is, he "primarily relied on interviews with many of the people who knew Erdos best." Schechter also "drew heavily" from biographical essays as well as magazine articles about Erdos. He also used the information from the over ninety sources listed in this book's bibliography. Finally, as I said above, this book does contain mathematical puzzles that intrigued Erdos. Personally, I found these interesting but some readers may find that they interfere with the flow of the book. As well, mathematicians who read this book may question the accuracy of a few of the mathematical concepts that are introduced. In conclusion, this book invites the reader into the wacky world of mathematical genius Paul Erdos. If you're like me, you'll find this book both comical and enlightening!! <=====>
Rating:
Summary: The hidden magic of math
Review: Bruce Schechter's book is exceptional. In telling this fascinating story of the eccentric mathematician Paul Erdos, the author manages to convey the recent history of math and capture the magic of this unique art/science. Quite an accomplishment for a book that is so enjoyable to read!
Rating:
Summary: Delightful, happy read
Review: Entertaining biography of Erdos. Interesting to know that he could visualize complex mathematical problems but not simple chess problems. Reduced rating by 1 notch because the book twice states John Von Neumann invented the digital, electronic computer. That honor goes to Eckert/Mauchly of the University of Pennsylvania. See Eniac by McCartney for further reference.
Rating: 
Summary: Sympathetic insight into the world of mathematicians
Review: I enjoyed this book and thought that Bruce Schechter did well to get across the humanity of the man and as well as some of his ideas. Inevitably, the mathematics contained in the book will seem a bit hard going for some but Schechter handles it delicately and manages a fair balance. The book is written in an approachable style and has a deliberately non-critical and inspirational tone. I recommend that it should be put in the hands of any teenager who is thinking of studying mathematics at university. If she/he does not like the ideas and characters described, he might be happier choosing another major!
Rating:
Summary: Lovely, hilarious and intelligent portrait of an amazing man
Review: I read the book on Erdos by the other guy (Hoffman) first because it came out a few weeks sooner. I wish I had waited. I could have save a few dollars by reading just Schechter's book and not the other. Schechter doesn't just write well about math...he writes superbly, period, whether he's writing about math or telling funny stories or explaining Hungarian history, etc. I would read any book he wrote on any subject. I read My Brain Is Open on a airplane flying coast-to-coast, and I turned down the meal --though it was airline food, it didn't look bad-- because I didn't want to stop reading even for a minute. I could have eaten and read at the same time and thereby risked getting it dirty, but it has a beautiful cover and I'm definitely going to want to keep it to lend to friends. It's amazing how much ground Schechter covers in a rather short book (I covered just 3,000 miles myself). At the end, I felt I had gotten to know Paul Erdos much, much better, even though I had read the Hoffman bio already and ought to have known him pretty well. One big difference: Schechter writes at length about Erdos's death and the events and stories leading up to it. This is a subject Hoffman all but ignores. Schechter wrote about it so effectively that I felt the tension building and, though I knew Erdos was dead before I started reading, it made me sad and somewhat emotional when the moment came in Schechter's book. It was a great life, though, and a long one, and a productive and generous and fulfilling one, so the sadness passed quickly into inspiration.
Rating:
Summary: What a man, what a life!
Review: I read this book after reading Hoffman's "The man who loved only numbers". I must say that "My brain is open" presents more of the human side of Erdos than Hoffman's book does. This book shows that Erdos loved numbers but he also loved his fellow men/women. For me, the biggest difference between Hoffman's book and Schechter book is the ending. When you're done reading "My brain is open" you'll regret that you never met Paul Erdos. Those who had the opportunity to know and work with "Uncle Paul" were touched by his brain as well as his heart.
Rating:
Summary: What a man, what a life!
Review: I read this book after reading Hoffman's "The man who loved only numbers". I must say that "My brain is open" presents more of the human side of Erdos than Hoffman's book does. This book shows that Erdos loved numbers but he also loved his fellow men/women. For me, the biggest difference between Hoffman's book and Schechter book is the ending. When you're done reading "My brain is open" you'll regret that you never met Paul Erdos. Those who had the opportunity to know and work with "Uncle Paul" were touched by his brain as well as his heart.
Rating:
Summary: Comparison to the Hoffman book
Review: I read this book after reading the one by Paul Hoffman. I would say that this one by Schechter is a little easier to read, flows better and is better organized. There is a great deal of overlap, but I was glad I read both. I liked reading about the Monty Hall problem and about Erdos' getting water all over in the Hoffman book, but Schechter had the conflict with Selberg in his book, which was meaningful to me. I guess I would recommend reading both.
Rating:
Summary: The hidden magic of math
Review: Paul Erdos was a unique individual. He never had a permanent residence; instead, he traveled from one mathematics conference to another with his few earthly belongings in two suitcases, one which held a few changes of clothes, the other a treasure of mathematics papers. He collaborated with mathematicians everywhere; the extent of these collaborations is so immense it gave rise to the Erdos number, which is this: You have an Erdos number of 1 if you co-authored a paper with Erdos, your Erdos number is 2 if you co-authored a paper with someone who jointly wrote a paper with Erdos, etc. About 500 people have an Erdos number of 1 and well over 5000 hold the Erdos number of 2. Erdos numbers go as high as 16 and the number of people with an Erdos number is said to be well above 100,000. Stories about Erdos abound. It is rumored that he walked into a classroom, saw some writing on a chalkboard and asked if this was mathematics. Upon receiving an affirmative answer, he then asked what the various symbols were. Immediately after the explanations were given, Erdos took chalk in hand and in two lines proved the hypothesis that had baffled other mathematicians for some time, and this was in a field of mathematics that Erdos was largely unfamiliar with! Another story had Erdos taking a train fron Boston to New York; across the aisle sat a beautiful female who said "hello" to him. One thing led to another; by the time the train arrived the two of them had written a paper! This book covered much of the life and mathematics of Paul Erdos; much of the mathematics in the book is number theory because it is a topic that is easy for anyone to understand yet difficult to prove. A typical example is Goldbach's conjecture, which says: "Any even number greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two prime numbers." Sounds simple enough and logical; 4=2+2, 6=3+3, 8=3+5,10=5+5 or 3+7,... The problem has been around for about 300 years but as yet lacks a proof. Other mathematics topics touched upon include Ramsey theory, the division of a square into unequal squares, and Godel's Incompleteness Theory. The book also shows the strange language of Erdos, in which women were 'bosses', men were 'slaves', the United States was 'Sam' (from Uncle Sam), and the Soviet Union was 'Joe' (Stalin), to list a few of his own variations of English. This book is easy to read, even if the reader has only a high-school background in mathematics. If you are curious about mathematics and/or human nature, you will find this book of great interest. I highly recommend this book.
| 
