CYBILS Reviewed: The Boy Who Loved Math

What I love most about The Boy Who Loved Math was that it really wasn’t about math. It’s about the boy. Paul Erdos was something, all right. A real “character.” Typically, I’ve come to think about the mathematically centric as people who are very logically minded, people who love rules. As you learn on the second page, Erdos was anything but. 

We don’t get a tremendous amount of exposure to those who use math creatively. Most of our experience with math comes from math teachers, who are very often logic and very much rule centric. After reading Paul’s story, I’ve come to rethink the way I see both mathematics and mathematicians. Which is precisely why this book is so important. It can reshape a kid’s entire conception of a subject with many preconceptions. 

As I flipped through the pages, I became more and more engrossed with Paul’s character. Similarly to how Steve Sheinkin made Benedict Arnold and Robert Oppenheimer’s character come to life by sharing a series anecdotes chosen with incredible care, Deborah Heiligman paints a brilliant picture of Erdos through poignant snippets of his life beyond math. In fact, a few weeks after I read the book I had a general sense of why we remember Erdos but it’s the details of his character that I can vividly recount.

At 21 Erdos was already a world renowned mathematician. Invited to travel to England, Heiligman recounts an experience of looking at the bread, looking at the butter, and finally, grabbing the knife to make the attempt. After zooming in on that little experience, Heiligman takes the reader back out, giving us the bigger picture. Erdos realizes he doesn’t quite fit into the world the regular way but being a guy who never liked to follow the rules, he invents his own. Paul never owned his own home, instead he traveled from city to city where a mathematician would take him in. They would cook for him, clean up the messes he made, and do his laundry and Paul would share the one thing he could- his mathematical mind. 

Have you ever heard a kid explain what they did at the amusement park? You know how they just go on and on about every little detail- we rode this roller coaster, then we got cotton candy, then we played the ringtoss... That’s exactly what I want to do right now. I want to just spill every single one of the anecdotes Heiligman included. But just like a kid talking about a fun park, I’d be telling you because I can’t get over how cool they are, not because you even care to hear. 

Paul Erdos was the Kanye West of mathematics. So extraordinarily gifted that people all over the world welcomed this very difficult person into their lives and accepted his faults because his talents so vastly outweighed them. 

The Boy Who Loved Math has everything I’m looking for in picture book biography. It’s distilled down to information and experiences that make me want to google this guy I’ve never heard of. But while the text is absolutely scintillating, remove the pictures and you’d miss out on soooo much original knowledge. Prime number theory imbedded into the chart the boy’s drawing, geometry theory transposed over the landmarks of Budapest, puzzles Erdos and his friend worked on overlay the illustrations of their meetings. 

But this story’s piece de resistance: LeUyen Pham illustrator’s note. The reader is taken through the book for a page by page explanation of all the details related to Erdos’ life that have been inserted. While it’s not totally uncommon to find a note about the artistic process the illustrator undertook, I’ve never seen anything as detailed. I sure hope this groundbreaking look into the complexity of creating high-quality illustrations for children’s non-fiction picture books quickly becomes as common as an author’s inclusion of their source notes. 

My friends, we have a very special book on our hands here. A fascinating true story about an obscure character, superbly illustrated, with an artist’s note that could very well advance the entire genre. Yeah. The Boy Who Loved is definitely a gem.