By 1996, when he died aged 83, the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos had written over 1,500 significant papers, while his life reflected the haemorrhage of Hungarian Jewish scientists during the Nazi era. He was a serious eccentric: wolfing down Benzedrine and Ritalin; living out of suitcases; and, while staying with friends, waking them at 4 a.m. to puzzle over theorems, or asking their wives to cut his toenails. Yet he remains an inspirational figure, and after the work of his countrymen in Los Alamos, was proud his work had no applications (until recently, with the emergence of combinatorics). Hoffman breezily nurses us some of the bizarre symmetries of elementary number theory, but this is neither a maths book nor a serious biography - rather a journalistic speed-read, with a few mental exercises to give you some inkling of the pleasure of the math.
Mic Moroney