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
For several years, no-one knew that the famous Arab author was actually a local maths teacher whose other passion was collecting porcelain frogs.
When eventually Malbata Han was outed as humble Julio César de Melo Isoza, he was famous enough for it not to matter.
As Malbert Ahan, 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.
This is the love that dare not speak its name.
People never talk about this sort of thing.
When I wrote my first book, people would come up to me and they would always say, so then, what's your favourite number?
And this wound me up because I just thought, that is just saying that you don't take what I'm doing seriously.
That's things I don't have a favourite number.
So I thought this was a silly thing to ask.
Showing 101–120 of 186 · page 6 of 10
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