The Man Who Loved Only Numbers Quotes

“Mathematicians need only peace of mind and occasionally, paper and pencil.”
― Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth

“When he said someone had 'died', Erdős meant that that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had 'left', the person had died.”
― Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth

“Those who have witnessed the deep truths of mathematics, Bell wrote, "have experienced something no jellyfish has ever felt".”
― paul hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth

“When the interests of Erdos's colleagues drifted away from pure mathematics, he made no secret of his disapproval. "When I wasn't sure whether to stay a mathematician or go to the Technical University and become an engineer, Vazsonyi recalled, "Erdos warned me:
'I'll hide, and when you enter the Technical University, I will shoot you.' That settled the matter."

When probability theorist Mark Kac had a paper published in the Journal if Applied Physics based on his work during the war at MIT's Radiation Laboratory, Erdos sent him a one sentence postcard: "I am praying for your soul." Erdos was "reminding me," Kac said, "that I might be straying from the path of true virtue, which, as a matter of fact, I was.”
― Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth

“This is the remarkable paradox of mathematics," observed commentator John Tierney. "No matter how determinedly its practitioners ignore the world, they consistently produce the best tools for understanding it. The Greeks decide to study, for no good reason, a curve called an ellipse, and 2,000 years later astronomers discover that it describes the way the planets move around the sun. Again, for no good reason, in 1854 a German mathematician, Bernhard Riemann, wonders what would happen if he discards one of the hallowed postulates of Euclid's plane geometry. He builds a seemingly ridiculous assumption that it's not possible to draw two lines parallel to each other. His non-Euclidean geometry replaces Euclid's plane with a bizarre abstraction called curved space, and then, 60 years later, Einstein announces that this is the shape of the universe.”
― Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth