Paul Hoffman (science writer)

This article is about the American writer and television presenter. For other uses of the name, see Paul Hoffman (disambiguation).

Paul Hoffman
Born	1956

Paul Hoffman (born March 30, 1956) is the president and CEO of the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City, New Jersey. He is also a prominent author, science educator, food entrepreneur, Moth storyteller, and host of the PBS television series Great Minds of Science.

Career

He was president and editor in chief of Discover, in a ten-year tenure with that magazine, and served as president and publisher of Encyclopædia Britannica before returning full-time to writing and consulting work. He lives in Brooklyn and Woodstock, New York. Author of at least ten books, he has appeared on CBS This Morning and The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer as a correspondent. Hoffman is also a paradoxologist using the pseudonym Dr. Crypton. He designed the puzzle in the 1984 book Treasure: In Search of the Golden Horse. He also designed the treasure map in the 1984 film, Romancing the Stone, starring Michael Douglas, Kathleen Turner, and Danny DeVito. Paul is a chess player rated around 1900 (or class-A level) who was the last man standing when world champion Magnus Carlsen played blindfold blitz chess against three challengers.

Hoffman, who holds a B.A. degree summa cum laude from Harvard, is the winner of the first National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Chicago magazine once called him "the smartest man in the world," but Hoffman claims the editors must have caught him on a particularly good day. The New York Times called Hoffman "the mayor of strange places" because of his penchant for checking in at out-of-the-way places on Foursquare. Paul's most celebrated book, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, a biography of the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, was awarded the Royal Society Science Books Prize.

Before joining Liberty Science Center in October 2011, Hoffman was the editorial chairman of the video interview website Big Think, where he personally interviewed Dick Cavett, Richard Dawkins, Annie Duke, Arianna Huffington, John Irving, Penn Jillette, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov and Ed Koch, among others.

Hoffman was the creative director of the Beyond Rubik's Cube exhibition, which appeared at venues around the world starting with LSC in Jersey City, NJ, the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland, and Telus World of Science in Edmonton, Canada. Exhibition elements included a 35-foot-tall rooftop cube made of lights that people could manipulate with their cellphones, a $2.5 million cube made of diamonds, a giant cube displaying the inner workings of the puzzle, and cube-solving robots. Google was LSC's creative partner in the creation of the 7,000-square-foot exhibition.

These days Hoffman is spearheading the development of SciTech Scity, a 30-acre "City of Tomorrow" innovation campus in Jersey City that aims to launch and grow world-changing science and technology companies and reimagine public school science education.

Partial bibliography

• Hoffman, Paul (2007). King's Gambit: A Son, a Father, and the World's Most Dangerous Game. New York: Hyperion Books. ISBN 978-1-4013-0097-5.
• Hoffman, Paul (2003). Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the Invention of Flight. Hyperion Books. ISBN 0-7868-8571-8.
• Hoffman, Paul (1998). The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdős and the Search for Mathematical Truth. New York: Hyperion Books. ISBN 0-7868-8406-1.
• Hoffman, Paul (1988). Archimedes' Revenge: The Joys and Perils of Mathematics. New York: Fawcett Colombine. ISBN 0-449-00089-3.
• Crypton, Dr. (1985). Timid Virgins Make Dull Company and Other Puzzles, Pitfalls, and Paradoxes. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-008043-0.

External links

• Paul Hoffman's bio
• Paul Hoffman's blog
• Presenting at Cusp Conference 2009 (video)