Der Zahlenteufel was published by Hanser in 1997, with the English translation by Michael Henry Heim appearing in 1998 as The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure. The book became an international bestseller — an outcome as improbable as its premise: one of Germany’s most intellectually demanding poets writing a children’s book about mathematics.
The novel follows Robert, a twelve-year-old who hates math (because his teacher makes it tedious), through twelve dreams in which a “number devil” named Teplotaxl introduces him to the genuine beauty and strangeness of mathematics. Each night covers a different topic: the first night introduces the properties of one and zero; subsequent nights explore prime numbers, Fibonacci sequences, triangular numbers, combinatorics, infinite series, the golden ratio, topology, and proof.
Enzensberger’s achievement is to communicate mathematical ideas with absolute accuracy while making them genuinely exciting. He invents playful terminology (prime numbers become “prima donnas,” Fibonacci numbers become “Bonacci numbers”) that captures the spirit of each concept without distorting its content. The illustrations by Rotraut Susanne Berner complement the text with visual representations that make abstract ideas concrete.
The book reveals something that Enzensberger had always known but that his reputation as a difficult poet obscured: he is fundamentally a popularizer of ideas, someone whose intellectual curiosity extends across every domain and whose writing gift lies in making complex things clear.
Collecting The Number Devil
First German edition (Hanser, Munich, 1997): Cloth binding, illustrated.
Market values:
- First German edition: $20–$50
- First English edition (Metropolitan Books, 1998): $15–$40
- Signed editions: $50–$120