From a faithful reader in Michigan: “Mr. D.—-Riemann.”
Well, yes; or practically any other mathematician. The great challenge of
writing a pop-math book is to try to dig out some interesting anecdotes from
the lives of great mathematicians, who for the most part are stultifyingly
bourgeois.
The argument — I mean, Chesterton’s argument, and my argument — gets
interesting only in literature and the arts, where the myth of the inspired,
antisocial bohemian genius has taken firm root in the public mind. So much
so that even a firmly bourgeois genius like Yeats — who seems not to have
lost his virginity until age 30, and whose first comment on being told he
had won the Nobel Prize was “How much is it?” — feel the need to affect
floppy cravats and strike brooding poses.