Press Release    The Life of Paul Erdös   Order from Amazon

Bruce Schechter, author of My Brain Is Open,
tells how he became interested in writing about Paul Erdös:

I first heard stories about Paul Erdös from his good friend and frequent collaborator, Ron Graham. I was writing a profile of Ron, who was the director of mathematical research at AT&T Bell Labs, for Discover magazine. While teaching me the rudiments of juggling (Ron is a past president of the International Juggler's Association) and walking on his hands down the halls of Bell Labs, Ron told me stories about his even more astonishing and eccentric friend.

He showed me the filing cabinets in which were housed the Erdös archives, the thousands of mathematical papers Erdös had written in his astonishingly productive career. Since Erdös had no home, but constantly traveled the world in search of mathematical inspiration, Graham had taken on the responsibility of managing his correspondence, sending off reprints of his work to colleagues, and handling his finances. Listening to Ron, I promised myself that I would someday know Erdös; I never did. In late September, 1996, I read about his death on the front page of the New York Times in an article by Gina Kolata.

A few weeks later, Graham invited me to travel with him to Budapest to attend Erdös's state funeral. Not having known Erdös in life, I felt a need to know him in death by writing his biography. In Budapest I met dozens of Erdös's closest friends who gathered to pay their last respects. It was a varied crowd of mathematicians from all over the world, men and women, old and young. The oldest had known Erdös as a teenager, when they had gone together on weekend excursions to the Budapest City Park to meet at the statue of Anonymous and discuss mathematics. The youngest were students who had come to Budapest on grants sponsored by Erdös. Everyone I met was enthusiastic about my idea of writing a biography, and all offered their cooperation.

I was particularly pleased to meet some of the child prodigies or, as he called them, epsilons, Erdös had discovered. Today they were middle-aged men and world-class mathematicians, who told me about Erdös's gifts as a teacher and kindness as a man. The type of mathematics that Erdös was drawn to his whole life did not require a great deal of technical expertise, the kind that is acquired over years of study, to appreciate. He was interested in the properties of numbers and counting, and had the ability to create problems that could quickly lead young minds to the forefront of mathematics. "My Brain is Open" will include a discussion of the mathematics of Erdös that will be accessible and, I hope, inspirational to students of mathematics both young and old.

Erdös's non-stop travels brought him in constant contact with a large cross-section of the world of pure mathematics, a world that is all but unknown to the average reader. A biography of Erdös is also the story of this world and the many strange and varied personalities who inhabit it. As Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman did for physics, My Brain is Open will help readers understand and enjoy the human dimension of the world of mathematics.

To learn a little more about Erdös, read an article that I prepared to give an overview (this is not an excerpt from the book --and there's a little joke added to the picture of my book jacket).  To learn more about My Brain Is Open, click here.

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