{"id":2354,"date":"2003-03-03T10:06:12","date_gmt":"2003-03-03T13:06:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/bb\/viewtopic.php?p=314"},"modified":"2010-05-09T10:09:49","modified_gmt":"2010-05-09T13:09:49","slug":"the-man-who-loved-only-numbers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/2003\/03\/03\/the-man-who-loved-only-numbers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Man Who Loved Only Numbers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cwob.com\/\">Andy Ihnatko&#8217;s Colossal Waste of Bandwidth<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cwob.com\/yellowtext\/yellowtext0303.html#92644\">points at<\/a> Paul Hoffman&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.paulerdos.com\/\">site about Paul Erd?s<\/a>, the Hungarian number theorist, who said about himself:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.paulerdos.com\/3.html\">Paul Hoffman<\/a> wrote an excellent biography of Erd?s, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.paulerdos.com\/9.html\">&#8220;The Man Who Loved Only Numbers&#8221;<\/a> &#8211; which I coincidentally reread last month. The site itself is also interesting, with lots of number-theory stuff casually strewn about, and certainly the oddest site navigation bar I&#8217;ve ever seen.<\/p>\n<p>Highly recommended.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update:<\/strong> Oops. Forgot to link to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oakland.edu\/~grossman\/erdosdeath.html\">Paul Erd?s Information<\/a> page, which has <em>N<\/em> additional links, and to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.oakland.edu\/~grossman\/erdoshp.html\">Erd?s Number Project<\/a>, which attempts to track collaboration between mathematicians. The &#8220;Erd?s Number&#8221; is an integer that measures the link of collaborations between Erd?s and some other author.<\/p>\n<p>I recall that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.feniks.com\/skb\/\">Stan Kelly-Bootle<\/a>, senior computerist and columnist <em>extraordinaire<\/em> (&#8220;more columns than the @#$%ing Parthenon&#8221;), once offered to co-write a paper with me, thus assigning me an Erd?s Number of 4 (or was it 5?); but it didn&#8217;t work out. I just read <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sarcheck.com\/skb\/soda0302.htm\">Stan&#8217;s recent SODA<\/a> and was shocked to hear about his heart attack; hopefully he&#8217;ll be okay&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Andy Ihnatko&#8217;s Colossal Waste of Bandwidth points at Paul Hoffman&#8217;s site about Paul Erd?s, the Hungarian number theorist, who said about himself: A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems. Paul Hoffman wrote an excellent biography of Erd?s, &#8220;The Man Who Loved Only Numbers&#8221; &#8211; which I coincidentally reread last month. The site [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Rainer Brockerhoff","author_link":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/author\/rbrockerhoff\/"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1q3Zc-BY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2354\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brockerhoff.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}