JUST SAY MAYBE

I was disappointed that Paul Hoffman felt it necessary to sugarcoat Paul
Erdos's lifelong use of amphetamines by referring to them euphemistically
as "other stimulants" ["Man of Numbers," July]. Erdos himself was certainly
not the least bit apologetic about living on speed. He felt - apparently
correctly - that speed helped him create mathematics.

When Erdos's mother died, he became quite depressed, and his doctor
prescribed amphetamines to improve his mood. Erdos took these for years,
even though his friends advised him to quit. Finally a fellow mathematician
bet Erdos that he couldn't stop taking the drug, so Erdos stopped, cold
turkey, for about a month. When he collected the bet, he said that his
output had been drastically reduced during that month and that that time
was "lost to mathematics." He then resumed taking speed and his prodigious
output returned.

Does this mean that anyone who takes amphetamines will become a brilliant
mathematician? Not at all. But it does mean that you can't believe every
piece of Drug War propaganda that you hear, either. As a science magazine,
you owe it to your readers to give them the facts, pc or not.

Jason R. Schenk
Joliet, Ill.

THE EDITORS REPLY: A book excerpt is, after all, just an excerpt. Paul
Hoffman's The Man Who Loved Only Numbers does indeed mention Erdos's
monthlong abstinence from amphetamines and the unfortunate effect it had on
his output. And the following passage, which describes Erdos's reaction to
the magazine article in the Atlantic Monthly on which Hoffman's book was
based, offers a touching assessment of Erdos's attitude toward his own drug
use:

"What do you think?" I finally asked. [Erdos] shook his head from side to
side. "It's okay," he said. "Except for one thing. . . . You shouldn't have
mentioned the stuff about Benzedrine," he said. "It's not that you got it
wrong. It's just that I don't want kids who are thinking about going into
mathematics to think that they have to take drugs to succeed."

Checked-by: Richard Lake