"The Man Who Loved Only Numbers" by Paul Hoffman is a biography about the memorable personality that is Paul Erdős, the prolific mathematician, who published with over 500 collaborators. Erdős, who is well-known for his contributions to number theory, set theory, probability theory, graph theory, and more, as well as the invention of the Erdős Number, a measure of one's proximity to having collaborated with him, is of course a subject himself. That said, in Hoffman's biography of him, there is a bit about the behavior of mathematicians and a lone physicist that does well to embody the spiritual and cognitive differences between the two groups, both of which share a passion for mathematical thinking but nevertheless are separable beasts.
The excerpt of interest tells of a mathematics conference in which a group of mathematicians return to the coffee table after a talk only to find a puzzle.
