He didn’t know how to butter his bread.įinally he took his knife, put some butter on it, and spread it on his bread. When Paul was 21, some mathematicians invited him to go to England to work on his math.Įveryone else talked and ate, but Paul stared at his bread.
Heiligman illustrates the magnitude of his everyday incapacity with an amusing anecdote: But while such attentive care gave the boy room to grow his genius - we do know, after all, that parental presence rather than praise is the key to a child’s achievement - it made for substantial social awkwardness later in life.īy the time time he was twenty, he was already a world-famous mathematician, known as The Magician from Budapest - but he still lived with his mom, who still did his laundry and cooked for him and buttered his bread. She and his mother did everything for him - they cut his meat, buttered his bread, and dressed him. She worried Paul could catch dangerous germs from the children at school.Īnna finally relented and Paul was entrusted in the care of the stern Fraülein. He wished he could take days away - negative school days! He pleaded with Mama to stay home. Paul told Mama he didn’t want to go to school anymore. His intellectual vigor paralleled his bodily restlessness - he simply couldn’t sit still in the classroom. Then he told her how many seconds she had been alive.īut despite - or, rather, because of - his extreme intelligence, Paul didn’t do so well in school. One day, when he was 4, Paul asked a visitor when her birthday was. It was his mother, Anna, who nurtured the young boy’s early love of math.Įven as a toddler - or an epsilon, a very small amount in math, as he would later come to call children - he was already doing complex calculations in his head. His two sisters, ages three and five, died of scarlet fever the day of his birth and his father spent the first six years of little Paul’s life as a prisoner of war in Russia. Tucked into Pham’s illustrations are a number of mathematical Easter eggs, such as the palindromic primes, dihedral primes, Leyland primes, and other prime varieties - a particular obsession for Erdős - she built into her Budapest cityscape.Įrdős was born in Budapest to Jewish parents who were both math teachers.
Package content is not flexible and cannot be modified.The great Hannah Arendt called mathematics the “science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself.” Few minds have engaged in this glorious self-play more fruitfully than mathematician Paul Erdős (March 26, 1913–September 20, 1996), the protagonist of The Boy Who Loved Math ( public library) by writer Deborah Heiligman and illustrator LeUyen Pham - a wonderful addition to the most intelligent and imaginative picture-book biographies of great artists and scientists, telling the story of the eccentric Hungarian genius who went on to become one of the most prolific and influential mathematicians of the twentieth century. Please note that if your order ships in multiple boxes, package components may not all be in the same box. The package item number is also listed at the bottom of your packing slip for reference.
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