Brazil's other passion: Malba Tahan and The man who counted

[Gerson W. Barbosa]

(05-07-2014 01:17 AM)John Smitherman Wrote:  Honoring Brazil's National Day of Mathematics...

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27254747

Brazil is better known for footballers than mathematicians, but amid the media feeding frenzy linked to the start of the World Cup next month it would be wrong to ignore the country's National Day of Mathematics on Tuesday. Author Alex Bellos tells the story of the man it honours.

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, A Noite, introduces a new star writer with a story on the front page.

Malba Tahan - or, to give him his full name, Ali Iezid Izz-Edim Ibn Salim Hank Malba Tahan - was a Middle Eastern author who wrote in Arabic and was translated into Portuguese for the Brazilian market, readers were told. His short pieces were morality tales written in the style of the Arabian Nights, which soon began to touch on mathematical themes.

They were a huge success, and in 1932 Malba Tahan published what would became one of the most successful books ever written in Brazil - O Homem que Calculava - The Man Who Counted.

Regards,

John

Thanks for the post and the link! I didn't know we had a National Day of Mathematics. If this can be an excuse, the law was sanctioned only last year :-)
I read Malba Tahan's delightful book when I was eleven. I have provided a slight reference to it in this post from 2006:

http://www.hpmuseum.org/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/...ead=101391 (Message #8)

Later in Alex Bellos's article we read:

"And yet here's the thing. The book was a literary hoax. Malba Tahan never existed. He was the pen-name of Julio Cesar de Mello e Souza, a maths teacher from Rio de Janeiro who never set foot in the Middle East.

Mello e Souza was born in 1895. After studying engineering at college he taught maths and wrote short stories in his spare time. When he submitted his first stories to the local newspaper, they were turned down.

But when he changed the names and places in his stories, and resubmitted them to the newspaper saying they were translations of the fabulous US writer RS Slade, the newspaper printed them.

Mello e Souza realized that his only chance of success as a writer in Brazil was to use a foreign pseudonym. His love of maths had led him to a fascination with Islamic science and he decided to write stories about ancient Arabia using the nom de plume Malba Tahan."

He wrote many interesting books, but only a few have been translated to English, I think.

http://malbatahan.com.br/bibliografia_completa.php (In Portuguese)

Best regards,

Gerson.

P.S.: Another related article by Alex Bellos in The Guardian's website:

http://www.theguardian.com/science/alexs...love-maths

And here's the book in PDF format:

ftp://ftp.unilins.edu.br/formigoni/Utili...culava.pdf (In Portuguese)