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For over half a century, at almost any hour of the day, mathematicians the world over might answer a knock at the front door to find a short, frail man wearing thick eyeglasses and a rumpled suit, carrying a suitcase containing all his belongings in one hand and a bag full of papers in the other, who would announce, "My brain is open!" The visitor was Paul Erdos, one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century and certainly the most eccentric.
Having no home or job, and incapable of the most ordinary household tasks, Erdos was sustained by the generosity of colleagues and by his own belief in the beauty of mathematics.
Erdos believed that the meaning of life was to prove and conjecture. He was fascinated by numbers and became one of the century's leading numbers theorists. He worked in fields of mathematics that would prove pivotal to the development of computer science, even though he had never touched a computer. He was the most prolific mathematician who ever lived, writing or collaborating on more than 1,500 papers with over 450 different collaborators.
Witty, filled with the sort of mathematical puzzles that intrigued Erdos and continue to fascinate mathematicians today, My Brain Is Open is the story of this strange genius, and a journey in his footsteps through the intriguing world of mathematics, where universal truths await discovery like hidden treasures and where brilliant proofs are poetry.
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Subjects
Mathematicians, Biography, Scientists, biographyPlaces
HungaryShowing 6 featured editions. View all 6 editions?
Edition | Availability |
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1
Mein Geist Ist Offen: Die Mathematischen Reisen des Paul Erdös
2013, Birkhauser Verlag
in German
3034863624 9783034863629
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2
My Brain Is Open: The Mathematical Journeys of Paul Erdos
March 2001, Tandem Library
in English
0613263073 9780613263078
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3
MY BRAIN IS OPEN: The Mathematical Journeys of Paul Erdos
February 28, 2000, Simon & Schuster
Paperback
in English
0684859807 9780684859804
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4
Mein Geist Ist Offen: Die Mathematischen Reisen des Paul Erdös
1999, Springer Basel AG
in German
3764360836 9783764360832
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5
My brain is open: the mathematical journeys of Paul Erdős
1998, Oxford University Press
in English
0198504713 9780198504719
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6
My brain is open: the mathematical journeys of Paul Erdős
1998, Simon & Schuster
in English
0684846357 9780684846354
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Book Details
Edition Notes
Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-213) and index.
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First Sentence
"THE call might come at midnight or an hour before dawn-mathematicians are oddly unable to handle the arithmetic of time zones."
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- Created April 1, 2008
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July 14, 2024 | Edited by MARC Bot | import existing book |
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February 18, 2023 | Edited by Stew | Clean up subject marks |
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April 1, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | Imported from Scriblio MARC record |