The Man Who Loved Only Numbers

Hoffman received an assignment by The Atlantic Monthly in 1987 to profile Erdős, which won the National Magazine Award for feature writing. After this, Hoffman followed Erdős on his travels for the last 10 years of his life learning about his exceedingly unusual life and interviewing his numerous collaborators in the process of writing this book.

A large part of the book concerns Erdős, but a lot of it is about other mathematicians, past and present, including Ronald Graham, Carl Friedrich Gauss, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and G.H. Hardy.[3] In the book, Erdős enjoys listening to Hardy when he speaks about Ramanujan. Hoffman also tries to give examples of what mathematics is and why he views it as important, and why many mathematicians such as Erdős devote their whole lives to mathematics. It also contains some history of Europe and the United States of Erdős's time.

The book, on the whole, portrays Erdős in a favourable light, pointing out his many endearing qualities, like his childlike simplicity, his generosity and altruistic nature, his kindness and gentleness towards children. However, it also attempts to illustrate his helplessness in doing mundane tasks, the difficulties faced by those close to him because of his eccentricities, and his stubborn and frustrating behaviour.

The book is mostly written without much technical detail and can be read by anyone without a mathematical background. Hoffman does give some relatively simple examples of mathematical problems throughout the book (like Cantor's diagonal argument) to illustrate some of the ideas in modern mathematics.