News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:A Life that Added Up to Something: Paul Erdos (1996) by zandorg on Thursday May 21, 2009 @04:44PM (#621100)
A nice read. I love reading about maths, just not doing it.
Re:A Life that Added Up to Something: Paul Erdos (1996) by gustavo_duarte on Thursday May 21, 2009 @05:29PM (#621153)
Try reading A Journey Through Genius:

http://www.amazon.com/Journey-through-Genius-Theorems-Mathem...

The read part is _great_, and it gets you to do math in a way that flows pretty easily from the reading.

Re:A Life that Added Up to Something: Paul Erdos (1996) by jyothi on Thursday May 21, 2009 @10:54PM (#621517)
I read "The Man Who Knew Infinity" - Ramanujan's biography and it was fantastic read.

http://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Knew-Infinity-Ramanujan/dp/068... Do check out recommendations by Amazon, seems like a great set of books.

Re:A Life that Added Up to Something: Paul Erdos (1996) by bitdiddle on Saturday May 23, 2009 @07:46AM (#623369)
This was a great book. The story about the taxi cab number 1729 was staggering to me in what it implied about how Ramanujan's mind worked. It was also profoundly sad that because the little formal exposure he had was from a book where there were no proofs he thought that one merely stated results. Many PhDs have since been awarded for proofs of some of these results.
Re:A Life that Added Up to Something: Paul Erdos (1996) by luckystrike on Friday May 22, 2009 @02:12AM (#621662)
Yes, it is a good read. Also, it was a good insight for me in to South Indian living/culture of those days.