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.

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."