It is almost impossible to find a genius who is ordinary, and yet some of them are even more extraordinary than others. Take the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdös. He had no home, no wife, no children. He had no regular job and no hobbies. All he had was one suitcase. It was half too big for the few clothes he had and the notebook in which he wrote down his mathematical flashes. Paul Erdös soared in the world of mathematics like the greatest virtuoso, but in ordinary everyday life he was completely helpless.
But he simplified his life and adapted it to his needs: he carried his suitcase from mathematics conference to mathematics conference and from university to university, whichever one he was currently lecturing at. He went wherever he was invited, and the invitations came from all over the world. At the end of his life, he could say that he had solved mathematical problems in more than 25 countries, but everywhere he preferred to stay overnight with friends. They were all mathematicians.
He turned up unannounced at their door, explained to the host that his “brain was open” and moved in uninvited. He stayed a day, two, three or so, until he got bored. When he had completely worn out the host with his questions and his ramblings, he said goodbye without leaving a single grudge behind, even though he had been a rather tiresome guest.
I’ve buttered my bread!
All his clothes were silk, including his socks and underwear, because he was allergic to other materials. He had enough money to buy new clothes, but he never went shopping, and his hosts had to wash the few items he had. He was a brilliant mathematician who asked questions and found the most beautiful answers, but he never learned how to turn on the washing machine. Anything that was not mathematics-related did not interest him.
For example, he never remembered to tidy up after himself. He was constantly washing his hands, and even sprayed the bathroom, but never wiped it clean. Once he splashed juice all over the kitchen because he had opened the container by making a hole in the middle. He drank a little, then let the juice run down the kitchen and into the fridge where he had put the packaging. He did not even notice the mess.
Although he was very interested in cooking and was always asking how to cook something, in practice he didn’t even know how to boil water. He realised one day that he might know how to boil an egg, but he had never tried it.
And he started peeling a grapefruit. He took a knife and cut into it with the blunt part, so that the juice spurted out on all sides when he managed to pierce the peel. He squeezed and squashed the grapefruit until his host finally gave in, took the unfortunate grapefruit out of his hands, peeled it and split it open for him to eat.
He didn’t even want to spread his own bread or make his own breakfast. He was not interested in everyday chores, nor was he used to them, because he was a child prodigy from a very young age. At the age of three, he was multiplying three-digit numbers. He tied his own shoelaces for the first time when he was eleven. At the age of four, he explained to his family that there were negative numbers. He subtracted 250 from 100 and got a result of minus 150. He first spread a piece of bread on himself when he was twenty-one.
“I remember very well. I had just come to study in England. It was tea time and they served bread. I was too ashamed to admit that I had never buttered it. I tried. It wasn’t that hard,” he explained to his friends, in all seriousness.
Until then, all this had been done for him by his mother Anna, who lost her two daughters, aged three and five, to scarlet fever a few days before his birth on 26 March 1913. She now protected her only child like the apple of her eye and spoiled him as much as she could.
When he was about a year old, his father, Lajos, was sent to Siberia by the Russians and released only when he was 7 years old. From then on, he also took care of him, but he and his wife did not let him go to school anymore. As they were both mathematics teachers, they taught him at home. This gave Paul the perfect conditions to develop his mental abilities – he got his PhD at 21 – and zero conditions to learn anything practical.
But he didn’t mind at all. Apart from maths, nothing really caught his attention. One day, his friends took him to an art gallery and showed him a picture of Matisse. He stared at it like a blank sheet of paper. A few minutes later, they were sitting in a park discussing mathematics. They dragged him to a theatre performance and he fell asleep peacefully. When they took him to see the rockets, he did not even raise his head to the sky.
The appeal of an exceptional mind
He never passed his driving test, but he was extremely attracted to driving. In the passenger seat, he kept saying, “Would I go that way?” “Wouldn’t you rather go this way?” “Shouldn’t I take that one?” One day he was being driven around by an acquaintance who had just passed her driving test. He got on her nerves with his questions, so much so that she crashed and wrecked her car. She vowed never to take Erdös in her car again, but her vow was not forever.
Erdös was like a child that no one could resist, even though he was, all skinny and pale, like an addict, and in his socks, sandals and worn clothes, a homeless man. His mind was extraordinary and, unlike other geniuses, he never developed his ideas in solitude. He was constantly on the lookout for new mathematical talents to explore mathematical problems with and for new friends.
He has thus collaborated with 458 authors, or more people than any mathematician in history, to write peer-reviewed papers. Today, these 458 people can boast that they bear Erdös’s number 1, which belongs to the person who published a peer-reviewed paper with him. Erdös number 2 means that the mathematician published a paper with someone who published at least one paper with Erdös. Erdös number 3 reveals that he published it with someone who published his with someone who published his with Erdös. Erdös’ highest number is 7. Einstein’s was 2.
But Paul Erdös was remarkable not only for his many collaborators, but also for writing or contributing to 1,475 scientific papers in his 83 years of life. He published his first one at the age of 18. At that time, he had planned to continue his studies in Berlin at the age of 21, but “Hitler got there first” and he went to Manchester as a Hungarian Jew.
In the four years he spent there, he visited the home only a few times. He was also in Bratislava in September 1938, when Czechoslovakia began to boil, so he quickly fled it back to England and from there to America. Just three years later, he earned himself an FBI file for mistakenly entering a restricted area with two mathematician colleagues. This allegedly backfired a few years later when he was declared a communist sympathiser during the witch-hunt and banned from entering America.
But he really cared little for communism, and he knew very well that he did not want a regular job, even though his friends were pressing him to stand down. The only home he ever had was a bedroom, a bathroom and a library, which his friend, the mathematician Ronald Graham, had arranged for him in a new extension to his house.
So from 1987, when he was 74, until his death nine years later, Erdös could come and stay as long as he wanted. He rarely stayed more than a month, even though he enjoyed his stay with Graham. His wife was also a mathematician, but they passed Erdös around like children – when he became too much for one of them, the other would “play” with him, then the first again, and so on.
Unlike many other geniuses, Erdös needed company, but his friends needed to know mathematics as well as his language. In his language, for example, the word epsilon meant child. Bosses were women, slaves were men, captured – married, freed – divorced, recaptured – remarried, noise – music, poison – alcohol, preaching – a lecture in mathematics, Sam – the United States of America, Joe – the Soviet Union and so on. If Erdös announced that someone had died, it meant that he had stopped doing mathematics, but if he said that he had left, it meant that he had actually died.
Sworn addict
Although he disliked physical touch and was not sexually active, he was very friendly and compassionate. He shared the money he earned among relatives, colleagues, students and strangers. He regularly used it to help the homeless. Once, one of them asked him for change to buy a cup of tea. Erdös had just received his first salary at the college he had rented for a year. He took a little of his salary for himself, and gave the rest to a homeless man.
In 1984, he won the prestigious Wolf Prize and $50,000. “I only kept $720. I remember somebody saying that I kept a lot more, considering the kind of person I am.” He gave money to almost every charity he heard of.
He once lent $1000 to a student he met by chance, Glen Whitney, so he could start studying mathematics at Harvard. He told him to pay him back when he could without jeopardising his livelihood. A decade later, Whitney came to see him again. I have 1,000 euros, he told Ronald Graham, but do I also have to pay interest? Graham asked Erdös what Whitney should do with the money. “Tell him to do with the thousand dollars what I did with it.”
Given his attitude to money, he should have died in debt, but at the time of his death he had $25,000 in his bank account. Since his mother died in 1971, Ronald Graham had taken care of him, and so he managed his finances. He took care of his fees, which came from all over the world in all sorts of currencies, paid his taxes, signed his name to his cheques and put his money in his bank account. If Erdös had tried to withdraw the money himself, the bank would have been suspicious because they would not have recognised his signature.
Erdös kept his notes in an annex that Graham had built for him, but it was his friend who had to edit them, send them to someone on his behalf, answer his mail for him … But he couldn’t look after his health for him. He could not, for example, get him to have cataract surgery. Not being able to write formulae all week was simply unacceptable. Nor did he want to give up stimulants.
As tired as he was when he started lecturing on mathematics, Paul Erdös suddenly came alive. You could say it was the adrenaline, but more likely it was the amphetamines. Many coffees and caffeine pills did not have the effect that 10 or 20 milligrams of Ritalin or Benzedrine had.
His friends told him to stop using stimulants, to slow down a little, so he wouldn’t burn out like so many young geniuses. “I’ll have plenty of time to rest in my grave”, he told them, but in 1979, at the age of 66, he accepted Ronald Graham’s bet: if he could go one month without stimulants, he would get $500.
Erdös won the bet. “You showed me I’m not an addict. But I did nothing. I got up in the morning and I was puking into a blank paper. I had no ideas, I was an ordinary person. Because of you, mathematics is a month behind,” he complained, picked up the 500 dollars and immediately returned to his “helpers”.
His health was apparently not too bad, because he lived to be 83, when he died more or less as he wished: a stroke at a mathematics conference. “I will miss the moments when he crept down the corridor to my bed at 4am and asked me if my ‘brain was open’,” said American mathematician Tom Trotter at the time of his death in 1996, adding: “I loved him dearly.” He was far from the only one.
Genius or devious?
This would hardly be true of Richard Buckminster Fuller. The engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, origin-of-the-world theorist and all-round designer was not very popular in his lifetime. He imagined the world in his own way, but it was not until he was on the verge of suicide at the age of 32 that new horizons opened up for him.
No, he did not have a difficult and depressing past. Born in 1895 into one of the most distinguished and free-spirited families in New England, he threw away a comfortable future as a Harvard graduate in his first year of study when he spent his money on Manhattan dancers and was kicked out of college. He didn’t think it was worth taking a second chance either. His parents, who wanted him to finish a respectable college like all his male ancestors, sent him back to Harvard, but soon he was off again, this time to work in a meat packing plant, where he finally had to start earning his own bread.
His student years were irrevocably over, and after a brief detour into the US Navy, his life returned to normal when he married Anne Hewlett, the daughter of a prominent architect. Bucky, as he was called by his friends, began working with his father-in-law, but neither of them had any business acumen, and in 1927, despite the good economic conditions at the time, they managed to bring the company to the brink of bankruptcy.
They had to sell it. Fuller realised for the first and last time in his life what fear and pride meant. Unemployed, he had just had a daughter. How will he support his family? True, his wife was not poor and she could support everything, but living on his wife’s account did not seem decent to him at the time. For a moment he thought of suicide.
Apparently, he was walking by Lake Michigan when he saw himself hanging a good metre above the ground, bathed in a brilliant light. Time supposedly stood still, and he heard a voice: “You have no right to kill yourself. You do not belong to yourself. You belong to the Universe.”
Since then, he has always written the universe with a capital letter and has never thought of suicide, nor, to tell the truth, of supporting his family. He turned his life into an experiment, turning himself into a guinea pig B, which is supposedly short for Bucky, and exploring first-hand what man can do for the benefit of mankind.
He moved his daughter and wife to a poor neighbourhood in Chicago and instead of hunting for work, he went to the library to read Gandhi and Leonardo da Vinci. He wrote down his ideas and later edited them into a book that was supposedly one of the worst written books ever published.
But he was no more hurt by criticism than he was by defeats. He pushed on, undaunted, talking incessantly about the home of the future, the one that could be built in a day, all the little things done in a day, and every device known to mankind installed in a day.
So he envisaged prefabricated blocks that would be lowered where they would stand by cleavers, connected by plumbing, electricity and gas installations. The foundation for the block will be made by dropping a small bomb from the splitter onto the ground.
My car can be a balloon
Then a whole complex of ideas erupted from it, with the common denominator dymaxion, or a word that is a compound of dynamic, maximum and tension.
The first was a single-family dymaxion house. It was basically hexagonal in shape, although it worked in the round, and was made up of pieces of steel. According to Fuller, when a family wanted to move, they would simply dismantle their house, clean it up and move it to wherever they wanted, for example to the Arctic, the Sahara or to the top of a mountain. In his view, one could live anywhere in these “instant” houses.
The model of the house he made in 1929 attracted so much attention that no one commissioned the house. His dymaxion car, which was to take owners to the inaccessible places where their new houses would stand, fared slightly better. They might even fly to them, because in the future, Fuller was convinced in the 1930s, the car would fly.
So far, he has only been able to put on the road an aerodynamic car with two wheels in the front, one in the rear and no rear window. It was so unusual that people couldn’t stop staring at it. When it first drove on American roads in the spring of 1933, traffic jams were so bad that drivers demanded that it should not be driven during rush hour.
Three months later, the prototype was gone. Another car crashed into it outside the entrance to the exhibition grounds. The driver died and one of the passengers was seriously injured. The accident was the fault of the driver of the other car, but in 1934 production of the tricycle was stopped after three cars had been successfully built, none of which flew.
Two years later, the same fate befell the dymaxion bathroom. The idea was to bring it to the place of use, already equipped with shower, toilet and everything that goes with it. The fourteenth bathroom was never built again.
The Dymaxion shelter, made of steel, was a little luckier. The US Army ordered some 200 shelters, but then production stalled when America’s entry into World War II meant that steel ran out. After the war, there was enough again, and he wanted to make dymaxion houses similar to the shelters, but the two that were made collapsed.
His idea of an underwater settlement, supplied by submarines, never came to life, and the one on the clouds remained in his plans. Houses, he thought, would be so light that they would float in the air, and people would live on the clouds. They would probably fly there in a dymaxion car when it finally flew, and write their dymaxion diaries there.
Fuller started writing his own at the age of four. In his diaries, he not only described what was happening to him, but also pasted in clippings about whatever interested him.
This was an exercise for the diary notes he started keeping at the age of 20. By the time he died in 1983, he had written down everything that happened during the day, including how much he paid for the dry cleaner. When he died, aged 88, his stack of diaries was 82 metres high.
He reportedly wrote in his diary every 15 minutes, except for four times a day when he had to wait another 15 minutes to write because he was disturbed by his dymaxion sleep. Eight hours of uninterrupted sleep was far too much for him, and he slept only two hours a day, every six hours for 30 minutes.
His colleagues could not follow this, nor could they follow his speech. He could speak for ten hours in total without a pause. Once, he did not stop for 42 hours to talk about what was going on in his head. The audience stuck with him because he had done after the Second World War what he had not done before the war – he had made a name for himself in America and around the world.
Three hours on one hand
The futuristic ideas didn’t really catch on, but he had better luck with the so-called geodesic dome, which he conceived in 1948. This was a kind of semicircular frame over which, for example, skin could be stretched.
When he first led a summer workshop at Black Mountain College that year, because the dean there was a friend of his and had done him a favour, the other professors scoffed that Buckminster Fuller’s travelling circus was coming. Even the students who worked with him were none the more impressed with him. The dome they had erected immediately collapsed.
He had to finance the research into its properties himself, but fortunately he married well and his wife sold the IBM shares. She got $30,000 for them, or about $300,000 in today’s money.
The following year, he tried again at Black Mountain College. His students were worried that it would happen again. “You only succeed when you stop making mistakes,” they were reassured by a man who had a PhD in stoic coping with failure before he managed to build a 15-metre-diameter dome in 1950.
It has finally succeeded. The Pentagon hired him to draw up plans for protective enclosures for radar equipment. He came up with temporary domes that were hoisted at exhibition sites around the world. He travelled and lectured extensively, although he became a lecturer at Southern Illinois University in the early 1960s. He built his home casually next to the student village – in a dome, of course.
He wore three watches on his wrist at all times. “I travel so often between the southern and northern hemispheres and around the world that I no longer even know a so-called normal winter or summer, or a normal day and night,” he wrote. “I wear three watches to tell me what time it is.” He was equally eccentric when it came to diet. He drank only tea and ate prunes, steaks and gelatine products from a single manufacturer.
Although he disliked nature, he believed that “less is more” and tried to minimise the impact of his ideas on the environment. He also believed that computers would one day regulate our lives, even though they hardly existed then. But at the same time, he also believed that the theory of evolution was wrong and that we, as fully formed humans, came from somewhere in space and spread across the planet not from Africa but from Polynesia.
A decade of almost total insulation
Oliver Heaviside did not have such thoughts, either in his youth or later. By the time he was 13, he had grown up in London so poorly that he resembled the children in Charles Dickens’ novels, and he had also survived scarlet fever and remained quite hard of hearing, which led to ridicule from his peers and no one to share his time with.
After his parents inherited a little and moved away, life got better, but the money for Oliver’s education ran out by the time he was 16. Fortunately, his aunt’s husband Charles Wheatstone, a physics professor and one of the inventors of the electric telegraph, came to the rescue and found jobs for all three of the Heavisides’ sons.
Charles and Arthur did well, but Oliver was good, but not very enthusiastic. He was constantly making up things to do and not to do, because what he really liked to read about was electricity, physics and mathematics. At the age of 24, he had had enough of everything. He left his job at a telecommunications company, returned home and locked himself in his room.
Literally. For the next decade, he hardly stepped out of it. His mother would leave trays of food outside the door and keep telling him to eat something. He didn’t think about food, he just read and wrote obsessively. It soon became clear that he was a mathematician, physicist and electrical engineer, albeit a self-taught one. Unfortunately, he was very difficult to bear.
The editors of the professional journals did not want to deal with it at all. The articles he wrote were unreadable and incomprehensible, but he refused to correct them. He scorned anyone who did not realise what he was talking about, and he hit his opponents as sarcastically as he could. Since he had no formal training, he was even more easily overlooked by editors and scientific colleagues than he would otherwise have been.
In 1882, the editor of The Eletrician took pity on him. The magazine was not scientific, but artisanal. Oliver published an article in it every week for 17 years and was paid £40 a year. He later remarked that for many years he “earned less than an assistant”, but at least in The Electrician he had the opportunity to share his findings with the world.
In any case, it was the only money he ever earned after the age of 24. His parents and his brother Charles contributed to his survival, but it is true that Oliver’s needs were small. He spent his days in a room that hardly let in any light and was heated so that it was “hot as hell”, as one scientist who visited him put it.
In 1894, his friends tried to get the British Academy of Science to give him some kind of social support. True, he was a renegade, but he had redefined Maxwell’s equation of the electromagnetic field and made great discoveries in the fields of transformations and electricity, so he deserved it.
But Heaviside rejected the offer as soon as he realised it was a handout. His friends changed strategy and two years later got the Academy of Sciences to grant him £120 a year as a kind of honorarium. This seemed acceptable to him, although it was still a social grant, just with a different name. Later, the amount was raised to £220 a year, but even that was not enough for independent living.
When his mother died in 1894, followed by his father two years later, he was left alone. He left London and moved to a small house in the south of England. Now he had not only withdrawn from people, he had become downright hostile to them. His neighbours were getting on his nerves and he on theirs. He did not like to wash and he did not like to tidy up, but to the villagers he was a strange man who interested them, and he complained that they looked at him as if he were an animal. As in his childhood, he was now the target of the heathen, who scolded him and allegedly blocked his sewers.
He complained about everything, but liked his house, which he removed all the furniture from and replaced with black granite rocks. He started signing his letters with the abbreviation W.O.R.M. He did not explain it, but the word worm means worm in English.
Owner of a personal slave
He stopped publishing for some time, and in 1905 he almost stopped researching. His health was failing, but in 1908 his brother Charles came up with the idea of moving to Devon to live with Mary Way, the unmarried sister of Charles’s wife. The solution seemed ideal: Mary owned a large house, but found it difficult to maintain on her income. If she and Oliver had pooled their finances and strengths, they would both have lived better.
Oliver agreed to the move, but not to the living arrangements. As soon as he was settled in the house, he started to terrorise Mary Way. He forced her to write to friends and relatives telling them that they were no longer allowed to visit her. He drew up a contract on their cohabitation and demanded that she sign it.
For example, it reads: Mary Way agrees to wear warm woollen underwear to keep her warm in winter. Mary Way agrees never to go out without Oliver Heaviside’s permission. Mary Way agrees never to give anything to anyone without Oliver Heaviside’s permission.
His aggressive approach scared her into signing the contract, even though she was the owner of the house and he was her guest. For example, to prevent her from accidentally running him over the water when she was thirsty, he hid her shoes so that she could not leave the house.
She literally became his slave, but she was not a sex slave because he was not interested in sex. So he tortured her for seven or eight years, until her nieces got fed up and rescued her completely numb aunt from her house arrest in 1916. Heaviside now explained to anyone who enquired about Mary that she had gone mad and had to be taken away.
He had nothing to do with it, of course, but he was very attached to her house, and they litigated until Mary agreed to sell it to him and finally get rid of him. She was left without a house and he lived comfortably in it until his death in 1925, without ever leaving.
He did not even go for the Faraday Medal, which was awarded to him in 1922, when the Institute of Electrical Engineering finally realised that it had been unjustly ignored by the scientific community for too long, but agreed that a single representative of the Institute could bring it to him.
It was his last contact with a stranger. He never let the doctor near him again, even though he was a hypochonder. In the autumn of 1924, he fell off a ladder but refused medical help. He would recover on his own, he insisted. In January 1925 he did not answer the telephone. The police broke into the house and found him unconscious on the bedpost. Aged 74, he was taken to hospital. At that time, he was supposedly sitting in a car for the only time in his life, i.e. lying in an ambulance.
He died shortly afterwards. His discoveries in mathematics, physics and electrical engineering have survived time, and so have the stories of his weirdness.
