The biography of a mathematical genius. Paul Erdos was the most prolific pure mathematician in history and, arguably, the strangest too.

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.

The biography of a mathematical genius. Paul Erdos was the most prolific pure mathematician in history and, arguably, the strangest too.

’A mathematical genius of the first order, Paul Erdos was totally obsessed with his subject – he thought and wrote mathematics for nineteen hours a day until he died. He travelled constantly, living out of a plastic bag and had no interest in food, sex, companionship, art – all that is usually indispensible to a human life. Paul Hoffman, in this marvellous biography, gives us a vivid and strangely moving portrait of this singular creature, one that brings out not only Erdos’s genius and his oddness, but his warmth and sense of fun, the joyfulness of his strange life.’ Oliver Sacks

For six decades Erdos had no job, no hobbies, no wife, no home; he never learnt to cook, do laundry, drive a car and died a virgin. Instead he travelled the world with his mother in tow, arriving at the doorstep of esteemed mathematicians declaring ‘My brain is open’. He travelled until his death at 83, racing across four continents to prove as many theorems as possible, fuelled by a diet of espresso and amphetamines. With more than 1,500 papers written or co-written, a daily routine of 19 hours of mathematics a day, seven days a week, Paul Erdos was one of the most extraordinary thinkers of our times.