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.
Erdős was born in Budapest to Jewish parents who were both math teachers. 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. It was his mother, Anna, who nurtured the young boy’s early love of math.
Even 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.
One day, when he was 4, Paul asked a visitor when her birthday was. She told him.
What year were you born? he asked.
She told him.
What time?
She told him.
Paul thought for a moment.
Then he told her how many seconds she had been alive.
Paul liked that trick. He did it often.
But despite — or, rather, because of — his extreme intelligence, Paul didn’t do so well in school. His intellectual vigor paralleled his bodily restlessness — he simply couldn’t sit still in the classroom.
Paul told Mama he didn’t want to go to school anymore. Not for 1 more day, for 0 days. He wished he could take days away — negative school days! He pleaded with Mama to stay home.
Luckily, mama was a worrier. She worried about germs a lot. She worried Paul could catch dangerous germs from the children at school.
Anna finally relented and Paul was entrusted in the care of the stern Fraülein. She and his mother did everything for him — they cut his meat, buttered his bread, and dressed him. 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.
By 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.
Heiligman illustrates the magnitude of his everyday incapacity with an amusing anecdote:
When Paul was 21, some mathematicians invited him to go to England to work on his math.
[…]
They all went to dinner.
Everyone else talked and ate, but Paul stared at his bread. He stared at his butter. He didn’t know how to butter his bread.
Finally he took his knife, put some butter on it, and spread it on his bread. Phew. He did it! “It wasn’t so hard,” he said.
But the buttering of the bread was merely the trigger for a larger realization — young Paul saw that the traditional path of settling down in one place, with a wife and children, working at a nine-to-five job, wasn’t the right path for him, he who longed to do math for nineteen hours a day. Heiligman writes:
Here is what he did:
Paul would get on an airplane with two small suitcases filled with everything he owned — a few clothes and some math notebooks. He might have $20 in his pocket. Or less.
He flew from New York to Indiana and to Los Angeles. He flew across the world, from Toronto to Australia.
“I have no home,” he declared. “The world is my home.”
More than half a century before Airbnb, he began staying with mathematicians all over the world, who would take him into their homes and take care of him just like his mother had. He wasn’t the easiest of house guests — he would wake up at 4 in the morning to do math, and one time he caused a colorful kitchen explosion by stabbing a carton of tomato juice with a knife, having grown impatient with figuring out how to open it properly — but his friends around the world loved him dearly for his brilliant mind and generous collaborative spirit.
Indeed, for all his eccentricity — TIME famously called him “The Oddball’s Oddball” — Erdős was no lone genius. If Voltaire was the epicenter of the famous Republic of Letters, Erdős was the epicenter of a Republic of Numbers — over the course of his long life, he collaborated with more than 500 other mathematicians and greatly enjoyed his role as what Heiligman aptly terms a “math matchmaker,” introducing peers around the world to one another so they could cooperate in moving mathematics forward. These collaborations advanced the progress of computing and paved the way for modern search engines.
He became affectionately known as Uncle Paul and mathematicians came to talk of “Erdős numbers” to measure their collaborative distance from the beloved genius in degrees of separation — those who worked with him directly earned the number 1, those who worked with someone who had worked with him directly got 2, and so forth.
Paul said he never wanted to stop doing math. And he didn’t. To stop doing math, Paul said, was to die.
So Paul left this world while he was at a math meeting.
(His famous peer John Nash — who inspired the film A Beautiful Mind, was awarded the Nobel Prize, and bore the Erdős number 3 — wasn’t so lucky.)
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“Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss.”
“I am not saying that we should love death,” urged Rilke in his clarion call for befriending our mortality, “but rather that we should love life so generously, without picking and choosing, that we automatically include it (life’s other half) in our love.” Nearly a century later, Elizabeth Alexander — one of the greatest poets of our time, whose poem “Praise Song for the Day” welcomed Barack Obama into his presidency and made her only the fourth poet in history to read at a U.S. presidential inauguration, joining such legendary dyads as Robert Frost and John F. Kennedy — invigorates Rilke’s proclamation as she bears witness to the vertiginous tango of these odd companions, death and love.
This she chronicles with uncommon elegance in The Light of the World (public library) — her soul-stretching memoir of how Ficre, the love of her life and her husband of fifteen Christmases, an artist and a chef, a blueberries-and-oatmeal-eating yogi and proud self-proclaimed “African ox,” collapsed while running on the treadmill in their basement. He was dead before his body hit the ground, four days after his fiftieth birthday — a death that Alexander and her two young sons had to somehow comprehend and fold into their suddenly disorienting aliveness. What emerges is a remarkable atlas of loss — a violent remapping of inner life, which Alexander ultimately transmutes into a cartography of love.
From the very opening lines, her writing flows with undramatic weight and piercing precision of emotional truth:
The story seems to begin with catastrophe but in fact began earlier and is not a tragedy but rather a love story. Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love.
Indeed, embedded in her remembrance is a meditation on love itself:
Each of us made it possible for the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other unsurpassingly.
What more beautiful a definition of love is there — in all of humanity’s centuries of seeking to capture its essence — than the gift of making life possible for one another? One of the most poignant aspects of the book, in fact, deals with the forcible disentwining of their two possibilities as the impossibility of death wedges itself between them.
Art from 'The Heart and the Bottle' by Oliver Jeffers, an illustrated fable about love and loss. Click image for more.
“One can’t write directly about the soul,” Virginia Woolf memorably admonished. “Looked at, it vanishes.” And yet under Alexander’s lucid and luminous sidewise gaze, the soul is summoned to reveal itself rather than vaporizing. She writes:
Henry Ford believed the soul of a person is located in their last breath and so captured the last breath of his best friend Thomas Edison in a test tube and kept it evermore. It is on display at the Henry Ford Museum outside Detroit, like Galileo’s finger in the church of Santa Croce, but Edison’s last breath is an invisible relic.
Ficre breathed his last breath into me when I opened his mouth and breathed everything I had into him. He felt like a living person then. I am certain his soul was there. And then in the ambulance, riding the long ride down to the hospital, even as they worked and worked, the first icy-wind blew into me: he was going, or gone.
When I held him in the basement, he was himself, Ficre.
When I held him in the hospital as they worked and cut off his clothes, he was himself.
When they cleaned his body and brought his body for us to say goodbye, he had left his body, though it still belonged to us.
His body was colder than it had been, though not ice-cold, nor stiff and hard. His spirit had clearly left as it had not left when we found him on the basement floor and I knew that he could hear us.
Now I know for sure the soul is an evanescent thing and the body is its temporary container, because I saw it. I saw the body with the soul in it, I saw the body with the soul leaving, and I saw the body with the soul gone.
She speaks to this evanescence beautifully, addressing Firce directly and in the same breath addressing everything that ever was and ever will be, the interconnectedness of all things, which is the very essence of the thing we call a soul:
Where are you? You are part of this storm, this wind, this rain, these leaves. Plants will one day grow from your bones in the Grove Street Cemetery, my empty dirt bed next to you.
I imagine your grave one day spontaneously covered with peonies, my favorite flower, the one you planted for me and which bloomed reliably on my birthday, May 30, every year.
[…]
Ficre in the bright leaves that have been falling from the trees in the afternoon light.
Ficre everywhere, Ficre nowhere.
Illustration by Isabelle Arsenault from 'Jane, the Fox, and Me' by Fanny Britt. Click image for more.
The subject of the everywhere-and-nowhere soul reappears as Alexander recounts how Ficre’s mother exited her own life:
My mother-in-law’s last night on earth, a fox crossed our path in Branford, Connecticut, as we left the hospice. We knew somehow that it was her… Do I believe that? Yes, I do. Poetic logic is my logic. I do not believe she was a fox. But I believe the fox was a harbinger. I believe that it was a strange enough occurrence that it should be heeded.
Between the lines of a favorite poem — Lucille Clifton lyrical meditation on her own husband’s death, which includes the lines “rising and turning / through my skin, / there was all around not the / shapes of things / but oh, at last, the things / themselves” — Alexander rediscovers this transmutation of energies as life and death waltz across the expanse of existence:
Death itself is like a snake shedding its skin… A new self reveals itself when the old carapace has shed and died, as though we live in exoskeletons with something truer underneath… What we see with our eyes is different from what we know: “The things / themselves.”
The mirrored mutuality of love and loss reveals itself again as Alexander returns to this notion of invisible essences in reflecting on the calling that most animated Ficre:
To love and live with a painter means marveling at the space between the things they see that you cannot see, that they then make.
Among the most mesmerizing of these invisibilia is the irremediable enigma of nonexistence:
What a profound mystery it is to me, the vibrancy of presence, the realness of it, and then, gone. Ficre not at the kitchen table seems impossible.
It is in the silent solace of the peonies that Alexander finds the promise of reconciliation between this vibrancy of presence and the incomprehensible dullness of nonexistence. In a sentiment that calls to mind Thomas Mann’s assertion that “the perishableness of life … imparts value, dignity, interest to life,” she writes:
This year, the peonies are magenta and white, and they blow open as big as toddlers’ heads, and soon they are spent and rotten, their petals brown and withered in the ground. Over and done until next year.
[…]
Flowers live, they are perfect and they affect us; they are God’s glory, they make us know why we are alive and human, that we behold. They are beautiful, and then they die and rot and go back to the earth that gave birth to them.
[…]
What is left of Ficre has a different form now. It is less sharp, more permeating, more essence, more distilled. It is less his body here, his body there, and more, he is the ground beneath us and the air we breathe.
This dance between the difference and sameness of forms comes alive in another aspect of the book: Sprinkled throughout it are recipes for Ficre’s favorite meals from his chef days, emanating a beautiful resonance with Alexander’s own craft — for the recipe form and the poetic form both effect something miraculously beautiful and nourishing with a great economy of language and proportion.
'Man as Industrial Palace,' a 1926 diagram by Fritz Kahn. Click image for more.
Embedded in Alexander’s memoir is also a subtle but unshakable reminder that we know almost as little about the machinery of the body as we do about the mystery of the soul. She cites one cardiologist who explained Frice’s death by asserting that “the stress of growing up in war and being a refugee affected his heart.” (The Eritrean War of Independence broke out in Ficre’s homeland shortly before his birth.) How jarring to consider that this much spiritual speculation goes into the supposed exact science of Western medicine — speculation that not only exposes how little we know but borders on superstition, invoking Wole Soyinka’s memorable meditation on Western medicine and African mysticism. With an eye to this vast expanse of unknowns, Alexander writes:
The earth that looks solid is, in fact, a sinkhole, or could be. Half of things are as they seem. The other half, who knows.
Perhaps Western medicine’s pathological reliance on euphemism, particularly in the face of death, is one symptom of our troubled relationship with the unknown and the unknowable — a tenuous hedge against the mystery of it all. Alexander speaks to this with aching elegance:
He was probably dead before he hit the ground, the emergency room doctor and the coroner and a cardiologist I later speak with tell me. That is why there was no blood on the floor, despite his head wound and the scalp’s vascularity. He might have felt strange, the doctors told me, before what they call “the cardiac event,” but not for more than a flash. One tells me he is certain Ficre saw my face as he died. We are meant to take comfort in this knowledge, if knowledge it is.
The knowledge of truth, Alexander suggests, comes in many forms and if there is a membrane between the practical and the poetic at all, between the scientific and the spiritual, it is porous and permeable. Although neither she nor her husband had religion present in their adult lives, she finds herself unexpectedly corralled into the spiritual path by the squeeze of sorrow:
Sorrow like vapor, sorrow like smoke, sorrow like quicksand, sorrow like an ocean, sorrow louder and fuller than the church songs, sorrow everywhere with nowhere to go.
[…]
I did not grow up in the black church, nor with the Negro spirituals. Now I understand them as never before. Their poetry feels pure and profound. I been in sorrow’s kitchen and done licked out all the pots. Nobody knows the trouble I seen. Steal away to Jesus. I ain’t got long to stay here.
Art by William Blake for Dante's 'Divine Comedy.' Click image for more.
Half a century after Flannery O’Conner discerned the difference between religion and faith, Alexander considers the other role of religion — religion not as a public institution in the service of dogma but as a private institution in the service of the human quest for meaning:
What does it mean to grieve in the absence of religious culture? … Art is certainly my religion. I believe in the chosen family, especially as I get older. I believe in some kind of encompassing black culture that I am part of — “syncretic,” to use the word Ficre liked — but I am also aware of the romance behind that sense of belonging. I am feeling very Jewish, I keep hearing in my head, thinking not of my actual Jewish Jamaican great-grandfather but rather about a wish for a religious culture that reveres the word and tells you what to do: Rosh Hashanah. Days of Awe. Invite the dead to Sukkot. There seems to be a poetic ritual for everything… I want rules. I want the prayers to say every day for a year at dusk and I want them to be beautiful and meaningful. I want to sit shiva and have the neighbors come at the end of the week and walk my family around the block, to usher us into the sunlight.
She revisits the allure of the old gospel songs, particularly “How I Got Over” by Mahalia Jackson — one of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s favorites. In fact, it was Jackson who, during a momentary lapse in his iconic speech, famously prompted Dr. King, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” (The daughter of politically active parents, Alexander grew up in Washington, D.C., and at the age of one stood at the Mall of Washington alongside her parents as Dr. King heeded Jackson and told the world about his dream.)
As she recounts an exchange with her younger son, Alexander returns once more to the question of the soul, shining her sidewise gleam on yet another dimension of it:
I hope you’re not turning all Christian, Simon says, when he comes home and finds me uncharacteristically blaring gospel music. I am not, but I am listening to Mahalia Jackson in a whole new way. How I got over, My soul looks back in wonder, I hear it for the very first time. The gratitude in that song is what washes over me, the word thank repeated over and over. My soul does indeed look back in wonder; I had Ficre; I have Ficre; I have these extraordinary children; I have a village; I have an art-form; I am black; we are African; we come from survivors and doers; my parents are wise and strong; my body is strong; I was loved without bound or condition; I exist in time and in context, not floating in space; my troubles are small compared to some; my troubles are not eternal; my days are not through.
[…]
Who we are as a people and how we make our way through sorrows that feel so profoundly intimate and personal but in fact exist on larger continuums, is what I hear in the song today.
[…]
In the absence of organized religion, faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms.
Perhaps because children are still free from the adult world’s tyranny of labels, it is her young son who best captures this function of faith — a function that transcends the unimaginative designations of fact and fiction, serving instead as sacred communion with the most intimate truths of one’s inner life. Alexander writes:
One night at bedtime, Simon asks if I want to come with him to visit Ficre in heaven.
Yes, I say, and lie down on his bed.
“First you close your eyes,” he says, “and ride the clear glass elevator. Up we go.”
What do you see? I ask.
God is sitting at the gate, he answers.
What does God look like? I ask.
Like God, he says.
Now, we go to where Daddy is. He has two rooms, Simon says, one room with a single bed and his books and another where he paints. The painting room is vast. He can look out any window he wants and paint. That room has four views: our backyard, the dock he painted in Maine, Asmara, and New Mexico.
New Mexico? I ask.
Yes, Simon says, the volcano crater with the magic grass. Ah yes, I say, the caldera, where we saw the gophers and the jackrabbits and the elk running across and Daddy called it the veldt.
Yes. Do you see it?
And I do. The light is perfect for painting. His bed in heaven is a single bed.
Okay, it’s time to go now, Simon says. So down we go.
You can come with me anytime, he says.
Thank you, my darling.
I don’t think you can find it by yourself yet, he says, but one day you will.
Illustration by André François from 'Little Boy Brown' by Isobel Harris. Click image for more.
The book borrows its beautiful title from a Derek Walcott poem, a line from which — “Oh beauty, you are the light of the world!” — was etched onto the bench by the side of Ficre’s grave, for Ficre was a man animated by “an unshakeable belief in beauty, in overflow, in everythingness, the bursting, indelible beauty in a world where there is so much suffering and wounding and pain.” But it is another poetic enchanter of the psyche that ultimately lends Alexander the closest thing to an answer in this dance with the unknown. With an eye to Rilke’s famous line — “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror” — she writes:
When we met those many years ago, I let everything happen to me, and it was beauty. Along the road, more beauty, and fear and struggle, and work, and learning, and joy. I could not have kept Ficre’s death from happening, and from happening to us. It happened; it is part of who we are; it is our beauty and our terror. We must be gleaners from what life has set before us.
If no feeling is final, there is more for me to feel.
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“Consciousness rejuvenates everything, giving a quality of beginning to the most everyday actions.”
When faced with a poetic image, writes the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (June 27, 1884–October 19, 1962) in his 1957 classic The Poetics of Space (public library), “we are in the presence of a minuscule phenomenon of the shimmering consciousness.” Bachelard is himself the proprietor of a shimmering consciousness, but although he is one of the most wonderful — in the literal sense of “full of wonder” — minds of the twentieth century and a major influence for such luminaries as Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, he remains thoroughly underappreciated.
Trained as a philosopher of science, Bachelard is palpably drawn to the Eastern spiritual traditions, his mind seemingly the self-contained scene of Einstein and Tagore’s famous conversation. There is a meditative quality to his writing, reflecting a deeply meditative mind. In his 1957 masterwork, he extends an invitation to embodied presence, triply timely amid our disembodied digital culture, and beckons the attention not by screaming but by seduction — nowhere more so than in the passages celebrating the enchantment of housework.
[The] daydreams that accompany household activities … keep vigilant watch over the house, they link its immediate past to its immediate future, they are what maintains it in the security of being.
What confers this imaginative dignity upon housework, Bachelard argues, is the quality of attention we bring to its simple tasks:
How can housework be made into a creative activity?
The minute we apply a glimmer of consciousness to a mechanical gesture, or practice phenomenology while polishing a piece of old furniture, we sense new impressions come into being beneath this familiar domestic duty. For consciousness rejuvenates everything, giving a quality of beginning to the most everyday actions.
Perhaps because he came from a family of shoemakers, Bachelard finds especial allure in the tactile transcendence of menial work:
How wonderful it is to really become once more the inventor of a mechanical action! And so, when [one] rubs a piece of furniture — even vicariously — when he puts a little fragrant wax on his table with the woolen cloth that lends warmth to everything it touches, he creates a new object; he increases the object’s human dignity; he registers this object officially as a member of the human household.
It bears noting that Bachelard’s use of “he” is what Le Guin calls “the generic he” in her spectacular essay on being a man. Here, too, “he” really means “she,” for it is the housewife — an inherently feminine archetype by both etymology and demographic distribution, especially in his era — that Bachelard celebrates as the chief practitioner of this creative activity:
Objects that are cherished in this way really are born of an intimate light, and they attain to a higher degree of reality than indifferent objects, or those that are defined by geometric reality. For they produce a new reality of being, and they take their place not only in an order but in a community of order. From one object in a room to another, housewifely care weaves the ties that unite a very ancient past to the new epoch. The housewife awakens furniture that was asleep.
Illustration by Yaroslava from 'A Stocking for a Kitten' by Helen Kay. Click image for more.
Bachelard considers “women’s construction of the house through daily polishing” and writes:
If we attain to the limit at which dream becomes exaggerated, we experience a sort of consciousness of constructing the house, in the very pains we take to keep it alive, to give it all its essential clarity. A house that shines from the care it receives appears to have been rebuilt from the inside; it is as though it were new inside. In the intimate harmony of walls and furniture, it may be said that we become conscious of a house that is built by women, since men only know how to build a house from the outside, and they know little or nothing of the “wax” civilization.
[…]
We can sense how a human being can devote himself to things and make them his own by perfecting their beauty. A little more beautiful and we have something quite different.
By tending and attending to objects in this way, Bachelard argues, we reawaken to their beauty, essentially reimagining them and creating them anew:
Through housewifely care a house recovers not so much its originality as its origin. And what a great life it would be if, every morning, every object in the house could be made anew by our hands, could “issue” from our hands. In a letter to his brother Theo, Vincent van Gogh tells him that we should “retain something of the original character of a Robinson Crusoe.” Make and remake everything oneself, make a “supplementary gesture” toward each object, give another facet to the polished reflections, all of which are so many boons the imagination confers upon us by making us aware of the house’s inner growth. To have an active day I keep saying to myself, “Every morning I must give a thought to Saint Robinson.” … A dreamer can reconstruct the world from an object that he transforms magically through his care of it.
For a living testament to Bachelard’s faith in the worldbuilding capacity of housework, see Carol Devine and Wendy Trusler’s magnificent The Antarctic Book of Cooking and Cleaning.
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People often weep before the paintings of Mark Rothko (September 25, 1903–February 25, 1970) — something he believed was a different side of the same spiritual transcendence he himself experienced while painting them.
In The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art (public library) — that remarkable compendium of Rothko’s little-known writings on art and storytelling, published by his children three decades after his death — the beloved painter examines how this contagious rapture of art works its magic on the beholder and, in doing so, exposes the invisible mesh of mutuality binding us together in a web of human affection.
Mark Rothko
Writing nearly a century after Leo Tolstoy’s insightful assertion that “emotional infectiousness” is the most important criterion for good art, Rothko considers the function of beauty not only as a deeply emotional experience but as a bonding agent that creates deep resonance between those beholding it:
The perception of beauty is definitely an emotional experience. That does not mean exclusively the human emotionalism of sentiment or sensuousness (as has already been shown), but instead that the process involves an exaltation which is communicated to us through the emotional system. This exaltation is usually composed of sentiment, sensation, and, in its highest state, intellectual approbation… Beauty conforms to the demands of the spirit. The experience of beauty may also be a sign of the reception of the creative impulse.
Rothko is careful to point out that technique alone doesn’t make for transcendence:
Skill itself is not an index to beauty. Of course, the artist must have sufficient means at his command to achieve his objective so that his work becomes convincingly communicative. But clearly it is something else which the art must communicate more than this before its author is seated among the immortals.
Noting that a wide range of creative stimuli can elicit the experience of beauty — from sculptures to sonatas, from paintings to people — Rothko examines to the undergirding psychological commonality:
Beauty … is a certain type of emotional exaltation which is the result of stimulation by certain qualities common to all great works of art.
Mark Rothko, 'Violet, Black, Orange, Yellow on White and Red' (1949)
But Rothko’s most delicate point deals with the parallel between beauty and friendship — both the emotional exaltation of aesthetic pleasure, he suggests, and the warm resonance of human affection require an intimate tango between abstraction and particularity, between infinity and finitude. With an eye to Plato’s definition of beauty, Rothko writes:
Plato … states that somewhere in nature there exists an actual prototype, an abstract absolute of beauty, of which all the manifestations are simply different facets.
[…]
To feel beauty is to participate in the abstraction through a particular agency. In a sense, this is a reflection of the infiniteness of reality. For should we know the appearance of the abstraction itself, we would constantly reproduce only its image. As it is, we have the exhibition of the infinite variety of its inexhaustible facets, for which we should be thankful.
Let us consider the case of our relationship to our friends. We love them with a common love because we all participate in the common prototype of humanity, but because each human being is a new and different manifestation of this prototype we want to know more about each one. Yet we should not be able to enjoy our friends at all if they could not be referred to the common prototype, for through the recognition of this identity with the prototype are we able to make sensible observations of differences.
[…]
Our notions of beauty today are essentially Platonic.
One is reminded of Anne Lamott’s moving meditation on friendship and the difficult art of letting yourself be seen, in which she urged: “Trappings and charm wear off… Let people see you.” How often do we find ourselves too afraid to let others see beyond the neatly packaged prototype of what we appear to be and into the particular manifestations of our singular humanity, the very source of our beauty?
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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 the protagonist of The Boy Who Loved Math: The Improbable Life of Paul Erdős (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.
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