Madmen and mathematicians

This is my latest reading pile. These two novels on the left caught my eye at different times at the local bookstore (the Foer book and the Doctorow book). But the other two were lent to me by my friend Judy, who taught mathematics before she retired. They have been sitting in a pile waiting for me to read them. While the novels were interesting, each in its own way, they will not stay with me the way the other two are likely to. I can hardly wait to find out what sparked Judy's interest in math. I already knew that she loves words as much as me.

The Professor and the Madman is a very interesting biography by Simon Winchester, who has written quite a few different types of books. The subtitle is "A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary." What is amazing to me was what an absorbing tale it is! Professor James Murray was the first editor of the incredibly massive undertaking of the first complete dictionary of the English Language, which took seventy years to finish, beginning in 1857. One person he got a great deal of assistance from was Dr. William Chester Minor, who was one of the thousands of contributors who submitted illustrative quotes showing the different nuances of a particular word's usage.

It turns out that Minor was in an insane asylum in Crowthorne, fifty miles from Oxford. The book tells of the relationship that developed over thirty years between the two men, and how for such a long time Murray didn't know that his colleague was mad. Minor was afflicted with what now is labeled paranoid schizophrenia, killed a man, and the only treatment at the time was to lock up the patient behind bars. One thing that I was struck with, over and over, was that if the treatment that exists today had been available then, Minor would most likely never have completed all that he did for the OED (Oxford English Dictionary). The task gave him a focus for his entire incarcerated life, and I wonder whether other geniuses might lay hidden under the lithium-induced state of present-day victims of schizophrenia. The author raises that very question toward the end of the book. The picture on the cover (at right) was taken of William Minor, which surprised me when I finally figured it out from the contents of the book. At first, I was sure this was a picture of the professor. The link at the beginning of these two paragraphs goes to the Amazon website where I found several copies of this 1998 book still available for very reasonable prices. It was a truly absorbing read.

And now onto the book that I'm reading right now: The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, the story of Paul Erdős, a Hungarian mathematician who died in 1996 at the age of 83. Paul Hoffman's biography of Erdős tells the story of a man who traveled constantly, never had a home to speak of, lived out of a plastic bag, and never cared about anything except, well, numbers. (That first link takes you to Amazon in order to find out how to order it, and the second takes you to the Wikipedia link about Erdős himself.) I am not finished with this book, but my mind has already been opened in many ways to the mystery of numbers. I knew a little about prime numbers, not very much, but they never seemed all that interesting to me in the first place. I didn't realize that there are perfectly sane people who spend their entire lives thinking about them. (Okay, maybe not perfectly sane, but they are not locked up.) (smile)

For those of you who don't know what makes a number a prime number, integers like 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, and 17 are numbers that are evenly divisible only by themselves and the number 1. Except for 2, all prime numbers are odd. They don't follow any particular order, and there is no known useful formula that yields all the prime numbers and no composites. At first, I wondered why anybody would even CARE, but then, while pondering their attraction, I suddenly remembered how incredibly fascinated I was years ago when I first learned about the Golden Mean or, more correctly, the Golden Ratio. I have been amazed at how many times I have seen this same pattern in nature:

From Wikipedia

Okay, maybe there is a reason why so many mathematicians throughout the ages have been fascinated with the mystery of numbers. Last night when I went to bed, after starting this book, I could hardly wait to ask Smart Guy about prime numbers. This started a conversation that went on for at least an hour, and I went to sleep with numbers dancing around in my head. Although I am only on page 73 of the 268-page book, I am definitely hooked. More later.
:-)