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Title: Contagious passion for mathematics. Beware!
Review: Eric Temple Bell was a fine mathematician on his own. And he could write, also."Men of Mathematics" is a great book and probably a perennial one. I read it first almost 50 years ago, in a Spanish translation. I was immediately fascinated. It obviously influenced me, as, later, on the brink of entering the university, I decided to change from medicine to mathematical physics. The chapters had charming titles: the one that talked about Cayley and Sylvester was called Invariant Twins (Gemelos Invariantes); the one on Galois, "Genius and Tragedy". Now I have the last edition, and the titles are all there. At the time of my first reading the men which impressed me more were Gauss (unforgetable chapter), Riemann (very moving), Galois and, of course, Newton. Recently I read some comments on his chapter on Riemann, considered overly romanticized. Who cares?
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