Alex Bellos
speaker
186 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2014
last heard Jun 2014
Alex Bellos’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Malba Tahan, or, to give him his full name, Ali Yezid Izzedim Ibn Salim Hank Malba Tahan, was a Middle Eastern author who wrote in Arabic and was translated into Portuguese for the Brazilian market.
His short pieces were morality tales written in the style of the Arabian Nights.
They were a huge success, and in 1932, Malbata Han published what would become one of the most successful books ever written in Brazil, O Home que Calculava, The Man Who Counted.
The book is set in the 13th century.
The traveller is Beremiz Samir, a Persian mathematician who joins the narrator on a journey that involves dozens of episodes in which he solves problems using his skill with numbers.
At one point, he visits the house of the king's minister, the vizier Ibrahim Malouf.
Bérémis impresses the vizier with an unusual way of counting a herd of camels.
He counts the number of hooves in ears and then divides by six.
The camels are a gift for the father of the vizier's 16-year-old wife-to-be, but Bérémis notices that one is missing an ear.
The book transports you into a magical world of Bedouins, viziers, sheikhs, princes and kings, rich in references to Islamic traditions and locations in the Middle East.
The maths is gentle, accessible and drives the stories.
It's mostly arithmetic but there are geometrical puzzles too and also curiosities like magic squares.
the man who counted rightly became a bestseller and turned Malbata Han into a household name, a mathematician as famous as Brazil's football stars.
His fans ranged from schoolchildren to the president of Brazil and include Brazil's most famous author, Paulo Coelho.
The book was a literary hoax.
Mahbata Khan never existed.
He was the pen name of Giulio Serza Gimelo Isoza, a maths teacher from Rio de Janeiro who never set foot in the Middle East.
He'd had no luck getting his short stories published under his own name, but his love of maths had led into a fascination with Islamic science.
So he decided to write stories about ancient Arabia using the non-diplom, Malbata Han, and only the proprietor of the newspaper that printed the stories was in on the joke.
For several years, no-one knew that the famous Arab author was actually a local maths teacher whose other passion was collecting porcelain frogs.
Showing 41–60 of 186 · page 3 of 10
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