Most Popular Books by Paul Hoffman

"A funny, marvelously readable portrait of one of the most brilliant and eccentric men in history." --The Seattle Times Paul Erdos was an amazing and prolific mathematician whose life as a world-wandering numerical nomad was legendary. He published almost 1500 scholarly papers before his death in 1996, and he probably thought more about math problems than anyone in history. Like a traveling salesman offering his thoughts as wares, Erdos would show up on the doorstep of one mathematician or another and announce, "My brain is open." After working through a problem, he''d move on to the next place, the next solution. Hoffman''s book, like Sylvia Nasar''s biography of John Nash, A Beautiful Mind, reveals a genius''s life that transcended the merely quirky. But Erdos''s brand of madness was joyful, unlike Nash''s despairing schizophrenia. Erdos never tried to dilute his obsessive passion for numbers with ordinary emotional interactions, thus avoiding hurting the people around him, as Nash did. Oliver Sacks writes of Erdos: "A mathematical genius of the first order, Paul Erdos was totally obsessed with his subject--he thought and wrote mathematics for nineteen hours a day until the day he died. He traveled constantly, living out of a plastic bag, and had no interest in food, sex, companionship, art--all that is usually indispensable to a human life." The Man Who Loved Only Numbers is easy to love, despite his strangeness. It''s hard not to have affection for someone who referred to children as "epsilons," from the Greek letter used to represent small quantities in mathematics; a man whose epitaph for himself read, "Finally I am becoming stupider no more"; and whose only really necessary tool to do his work was a quiet and open mind. Hoffman, who followed and spoke with Erdos over the last 10 years of his life, introduces us to an undeniably odd, yet pure and joyful, man who loved numbers more than he loved God--whom he referred to as SF, for Supreme Fascist. He was often misunderstood, and he certainly annoyed people sometimes, but Paul Erdos is no doubt missed. --Therese Littleton

Essays discuss number theory, cryptography, topology, chess playing, computers, algorithms, parallel processing, and political representation

In these wide-ranging essays Paul Hoffman argues that Descartes retains three Aristotelian doctrines: soul and body are related as form to matter; an agent''s action is the same as the patient''s passion; cognition is possible because things that exist in the world can exist in the soul in another way.

The epic story of Thomas Cale—introduced so memorably in The Left Hand of God—continues as the Redeemers use his prodigious gifts to further their sacred goal: the extinction of humankind and the end of the world... To the warrior-monks known as the Redeemers, “the last four things” represent the culmination of a faithful life. Death. Judgment. Heaven. Hell. The last four things represent eternal bliss—or endless destruction, permanent chaos, and infinite pain. Perhaps nowhere are the competing ideas of heaven and hell exhibited more clearly than in the dark and tormented soul of Thomas Cale. Betrayed by the girl he loves but still marked by a child’s innocence, possessed of a remarkable aptitude for violence but capable of extreme tenderness, Cale will lead the Redeemers into a battle for nothing less than the fate of the human race. And though his broken heart foretells the bloody trail he will leave in pursuit of a personal peace he can never achieve, a glimmer of hope remains—the question even Cale can’t answer: When it comes time to decide the fate of the world, to ensure the extermination of humankind or spare it, what will he choose? To express God’s will on the edge of his sword, or to forgive his fellow man—and himself?

"By the turn of the century, Santos-Dumont had moved to Paris. Soon, the dashing and impeccably dressed aeronaut was barhopping around the city in a one-man dirigible he invented, circling above crowds and crashing into rooftops. Eventually, he would join the world-wide competition to build the first true airplane. Once he succeeded, the press hailed him as the man who had conquered the air. (Because the Wright brothers worked in near secrecy, word of their first flights had not widely reached Europe when Santos-Dumon took to the skies.) His picture appeared on cigar boxes and dinner plates and he dined regularly with the Cartiers, the Rothschilds, and the Roosevelts, hosting "aerial dinners" in which his guests ate at an elevated table so they could imagine how it felt to be above the world." "But all would change after Santos-Dumont witnessed the destructive capacity of flying machines in World War I."--BOOK JACKET.

THE GRIPPING NEW ADVENTURE FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE LEFT HAND OF GOD SERIES America is on the brink of civil war. Only Thomas Cale can stop it . . . ________ Thomas Cale - the world''s most dangerous yet reluctant hero - has been running from his enemies. Tracked down moments before his execution, Cale is presented with a chance to escape. But it comes at a price: He must murder the American president. The father of modern democracy. The man fighting the south''s attempts to reinstate slavery. Accept, and he risks the fates of millions. Refuse, and he endangers his own life . . . ________ Praise for Paul Hoffman: ''Fiction on a grand and ambitious scale'' Daily Telegraph ''Brooding and magnificent'' Eoin Colfer ''Exhilaratingly engaging writing'' Spectator ''Gripped me from the first chapter'' Conn Iggulden ''A riveting, powerful tale'' Publishers Weekly

Following the bestselling novels The Left Hand of God and The Last Four Things comes the final installment of Paul Hoffman’s stark, epic trilogy. Thomas Cale has been running from the truth…. Since discovering that his brutal military training has been for one purpose—to destroy God’s greatest mistake, mankind itself—Cale has been hunted by the very man who made him into the Angel of Death: Pope Redeemer Bosco. Cale is a paradox: arrogant and innocent, generous and pitiless. Feared and revered by those who created him, he has already used his breathtaking talent for violence and destruction to bring down the most powerful civilization in the world. But Thomas Cale’s soul is dying. As his body is racked with convulsions, he knows that the final judgment will not wait. As the day of reckoning draws close, Cale’s sense of vengeance leads him back to the heart of darkness—the Sanctuary—and to confront the person he hates most in the world….

Paul Hoffman, a former senior censor at the British Board of Film Classification, has written a compelling and captivating novel that challenges our ideas about censorship, prejudice and the fine line between art and exploitation.

In the days before personal computers, BASIC was the easy programming language to learn, and serious programmers learned FORTRAN or COBOL to do “real work.” Today, many people have discovered that Perl is both a great beginning programming language and one that enables them to write powerful programs with little effort. If you’re interested in discovering how to program (or how others program), Perl For Dummies, 4th Edition, is for you. If you already know something about programming (but not about Perl), this book is also for you. If you’re already an expert programmer, you’re still welcome to read this book; you can just skip the basic stuff (you never know what kind of new tips and tricks you’ll pick up). This reference guide shows you how to use Perl under many different operating systems, such as UNIX, many flavors of Windows (Windows 95/98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows Me, and Windows XP), and Macintosh OS 9 and OS X; in fact, Perl runs on many more operating systems than these. Here''s a sampling of what Perl For Dummies, 4th Edition, has to offer: Installing Perl on various platforms Nailing down the basics of building Perl programs Working with text and numbers Constructing lists and working with them Creating conditionals and loops Delving into more advanced features such as operators and functions Reading and writing files and directories Using subroutines for modularity Demystifying Web server programs Creating your own Internet clients The Perl programming language enables you to write fully working computer programs with just a few steps. It’s particularly good at common programming tasks, such as reading and writing text files, but it also excels at reducing the work that programmers have to do. Perl For Dummies, 4th Edition, shows you how to do all of that and how to modify programs to your heart’s content. After all, one of the common phrases in the world of Perl programmers is, “There''s more than one way to do it.”

"Looks at the twists and turns in the investigation, possible perpetrators . . . as well as some of the good that eventually came out of this tragedy" ( Wauwatosa Patch). In 1925, the peaceful Milwaukee suburb of Wauwatosa found itself involved in mystery and horror. Eight-year-old Arthur ''Buddy'' Schumacher Jr. was last seen by three of his friends after they hopped off a freight train they''d jumped to get a ride to a nearby swimming hole. For seven weeks, the community and state searched desperately to find the boy until his body was found just a mile from his house with his clothing torn and a handkerchief shoved down his throat. The police pursued several promising leads, but to no avail. Includes photos. "Tosa native Paul Hoffman reconstructs the case . . . and finds it more than cold . . . He conjures up a picture of a much different Wauwatosa than we know today." — Shepherd Express "More than 85 years later, the murder of Buddy Schumacher remains unsolved. There were suspects at the time and their stories and the cases against them are included in Murder in Wauwatosa." — OnMilwaukee

"Writers like Hoffman are too rare. This wonderful book gripped me from the first chapter and dropped me days later, dazed and grinning to myself." -Conn Iggulden, "New York Times" bestselling author of "The Dangerous Book for Boys" Raised from early childhood in the Redeemer Sanctuary, the stronghold of a secretive sect of warrior monks, Thomas Cale has known only deprivation, punishment, and grueling training. When he escsapes to the outside world, Cale learns that his embittered heart is still capable of loving- and breaking. But the Redeemers won''t accept the defection of their prized pupil without a fight...