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
When eventually Malbata Han was outed as humble Julio Cesar de Melo Isoza, he was famous enough for it not to matter.
As Malbata Han, Melo Esouza wrote more than 100 books, about half of them recreational maths and most of them set in the Islamic Middle East, although he also wrote stories about rabbis, Greeks, Chinese and Babylonians.
Yet despite his love of foreign cultures, he only left Brazil to go to Portugal and Argentina.
He died in 1974, by which time he had sold more than a million books in Brazil.
The man who counted remains his most famous, and it's still in print.
And he's going to carry on being part of Brazilian culture since the government decreed that, as of last year, his birthday, May 6th, is the National Day of Mathematics.
Malbata Han was called the Brazilian of Arabia and the Pele of Numbers.
So, did this all-Brazilian hero like football?
No.
Not really.
He thought it was a bit boring.
Maths, Islam and collecting Thai frogs.
Now that was a lot more fun.
Rio de Janeiro, 1925, and Brazil is on the up.
Workers are building the city's landmark Christ the Redeemer statue, samba, a new music, is becoming a national craze, and the country's main newspaper, Anoiche, introduces a new star writer with a story on the front page.
Malba Tahan, or, to give him his full name, Ali Yazid 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.
In the name of Allah, the most beneficent, the most merciful.
Showing 61–80 of 186 · page 4 of 10
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