Thanks for the pointers. I'll check them out.
I recently read
- The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom
- The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (Paul Erdős)
The Dirac book is by a physicist, as opposed to a professional biographer. I very much enjoyed it. Dirac crossed paths and interacted with all of the great quantum physicists in the 20th century. He and his work never captured the public imagination in the same way Einstein did, nor did his personality and propensity for teaching resonate like Feynman or Sagan. (Feynman was, of course, an exceedingly brilliant physicist, but I think he was known more by the public for his personality than his QED). But he had a lot of ideas that were ahead of his time, and he was driven by the notion of mathematical beauty. Hell, the Dirac equation was a work of inspired genius that seemed to come from the annals of his mind alone.
Similar to Einstein, his work got away from him, and later in life he was resistant to the beast he helped create (quantum field theory).
Erdős was a prolific, unparalleled genius in number theory, as well as a wandering academic. He was quite inept at self-care, and found shelter based on the hospitality of his friends and colleagues. He never held a permanent position, spending his time trotting the globe to collaborate with interesting folks. I came away from the book feeling quite melancholy about the man and his life. But he seemed to have followed his passion in a way few do. On the other hand, he would likely pity me, the mathematician-turned-physicist-turned-industrial-researcher.