Júlio César de Mello e Souza (Rio de Janeiro, May 6, 1895 – Recife, June 18, 1974), was a Brazilian writer and mathematics teacher. He was well known in Brazil and abroad for his books on recreational mathematics, most of them published under the pen name of Malba Tahan, a fictitious Persian scholar. He wrote 69 novels and 51 books of mathematics and other subjects. Júlio César's most popular books, including The Man Who Counted, are collections of mathematical problems, puzzles, curiosities, and embedded in tales inspired by the Arabian Nights. He thoroughly researched his subject matters — not only the mathematics, but also the history, geography, and culture of the Islamic Empire which was the backdrop and connecting thread of his books. Yet Júlio César's travels outside Brazil were limited to short visits to Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Lisbon: he never set foot in the deserts and cities he described in his books. Júlio César was very critical of the educational methods used in Brazilian classrooms, especially for mathematics. "The mathematics teacher is a sadist," he claimed, "who loves to make everything as complicated as possible." In education, he was decades ahead of his time, and his proposals are still more praised than implemented today. For his books, Júlio César received a prize by the prestigious Brazilian Literary Academy and was made a member of the Pernambuco Literary Academy. The Malba Tahan Institute was founded in 2004 at Queluz to preserve his legacy. In 2013, the State Legislature of Rio de Janeiro determined his birthday, May 6, to be commemorated as the Mathematician's Day.
Early life Júlio César was born in Rio de Janeiro but spent most of his childhood in Queluz, a small rural town in the State of São Paulo. His father, João de Deus de Mello e Souza, was a civil servant with limited salary and eight (some reports say nine) children to support. In 1905 he was sent with his older brother, João Batista, to Rio de Janeiro to attend preparatory classes for admission to the prestigious Colégio Militar do Rio de Janeiro, where he studied from 1906 to 1909, and later at Colégio Pedro II. As a student, Júlio César was not academically successful. In a 1905 letter to their parents, João Batista tells that little Júlio "is bad at writing, and a failure in mathematics". His grade reports at Colégio Pedro II show that he once failed an Algebra exam, and barely passed one on Arithmetic. He later attributed these results to the teaching practices of the time, based on "the detestable method of salivation". As a child in Queluz, he play with frogs. As an adult, he kept up with this hobby by assembling a large collection of frog statuettes. His career as a writer began while he was still in high school, when one of his classmates offered him a brand-new pen and a postage stamp from Chile in exchange for an essay on the theme of "Hope", the homework for the next day. According to his memoirs, Júlio was called late at night by other anxious students, and by the next morning he had provided four different essays on "Hope", at 400 réis a piece. He kept on this activity for the rest of the year, writing on "Hate", "Nostalgia", and whatever else the teacher demanded. Many years later he met his teacher, Silva Ramos, and told him of those dubious activities. When Silva Ramos introduced him jokingly to Raul Pederneiras as a "merchant of Hope and Hate", he got from the man prophetic advice: "Forget Hate and go on selling Hope. Take up this poetic profession, Merchant of Hope: since that business is profitable for the buyer, and even more so for the seller."
Career
Writing Júlio began to write tales on his own while still in his teens but did not impress the critics in his family. His brother João Batista recalls that Júlio's tales were full of superfluous characters with bizarre names like "Mardukbarian" or "Protocholóski". In 1918, at the age of 23, Júlio César presented five of his tales to the editor of the newspaper O Imparcial, where he worked, but his boss did not even look at them. Undaunted, Júlio picked up the manuscripts and brought them back a few days later, this time pretending that they were translations of the work of a certain "R. S. Slady," supposedly the rage in New York City. The first of those tales, The Jew's Revenge, was published in the front page of the next issue of the newspaper; and the rest followed suit. This experience convinced Júlio to assume a "foreign" pen name. He chose an Arabian identity — because, as he declared in an interview, the Arabs were unsurpassed in the art of storytelling. For the next seven years he prepared himself by studying Arabic and reading all he could on Islamic culture. In 1925, he sold the idea of a series of tales on Oriental themes to Irineu Marinho, editor of the newspaper A Noite (which would later become a Brazilian media conglomerate, the Organizações Globo). His stories, published in the column Contos de Malba Tahan ("Tales of Malba Tahan"), were attributed to a fictitious Arabian scholar of that name, and ostensibly translated by an equally fictitious "Professor Breno Alencar Bianco". Whether for the catchy pseudonym, or (more likely) for the author's lively style and imagination, his books were a resounding success, and he became a national celebrity. Even though his identity soon was known to everybody, he continued to use the name of Malba Tahan in his public life. He had a rubber stamp made with that name in Arabic script, which he used when grading his student's homework; and, in 1952 — by special permission of Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas — he added "Malba Tahan" to his own legal name.
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