Paul Erdős

Paul Erdős (born March 26, 1913, Budapest, Hungary—died September 20, 1996, Warsaw, Poland) Hungarian “freelance” mathematician (known for his work in number theory and combinatorics) and legendary eccentric who was arguably the most prolific mathematician of the 20th century, in terms of both the number of problems he solved and the number of problems he convinced others to tackle.

The son of two high-school mathematics teachers, Erdős had two sisters, ages three and five, who contracted scarlet fever and died the day he was born. His mother, fearing that he, too, might contract a fatal childhood disease, kept him home from school until the age of 10. With his father confined to a Russian prisoner-of-war camp for six years and his mother working long hours, Erdős passed the time flipping through his parents’ mathematics books. “I fell in love with numbers at a young age,” Erdős later recalled. “They were my friends. I could depend on them to always be there and always behave in the same way.” At age three he entertained his mother’s friends by multiplying three-digit numbers in his head, and at four years old he discovered negative numbers. “I told my mother,” he said, “that if you take 250 from 100, you get –150.”

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In 1930, at age 17, Erdős entered the Péter Pázmány University in Budapest, where in four years he completed his undergraduate work and earned a Ph.D. in mathematics. Of all the numbers, it was the primes (integers such as 2, 3, 5, 7, and 11 whose only divisors are 1 and themselves) that were Erdős’s “best friends.” As a college freshman, he made a name for himself in mathematical circles with a stunningly simple proof of Bertrand’s postulate, which says that a prime can always be found between any integer (greater than 1) and its double. Even at this early point in his career, Erdős had definite ideas about mathematical elegance. He believed that God, whom he affectionately called the S.F. or Supreme Fascist, had a transfinite book (“transfinite” being a mathematical concept for something larger than infinity) that contained the shortest, most beautiful proof for every conceivable mathematical problem. The highest compliment he could pay to a colleague’s work was to say, “That’s straight from The Book.” As for Bertrand’s postulate, no one doubted that Erdős had found The Book proof.

During his university years he and other young Jewish mathematicians, who called themselves the Anonymous group, championed a fledgling branch of mathematics called Ramsey theory, which has as its philosophical underpinning the idea that complete disorder is impossible. A concrete example is the random scattering of points on a plane (a flat surface). The Ramsey theorist conjectures that no matter how haphazard the scattering appears, certain patterns and configurations of points must emerge.

In 1934 Erdős, disturbed by the rise of anti-Semitism in Hungary, left the country for a four-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Manchester in England. In September 1938 he immigrated to the United States, accepting a one-year appointment at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, where he cofounded the field of probabilistic number theory. During the 1940s he wandered about the United States from one university to the next—Purdue, Stanford, Notre Dame, Johns Hopkins—spurning full-time job offers so that he would have the freedom to work with anyone at any time on any problem of his choice. Thus began half a century of nomadic existence that would make him a legend in the mathematics community. With no home, no wife, and no job to tie him down, his wanderlust took him to Israel, China, Australia, and 22 other countries (although sometimes he was turned away at the border—during the Cold War, Hungary feared he was an American spy, and the United States feared he was a communist spy). Erdős would show up—often unannounced—on the doorstep of a fellow mathematician, declare “My brain is open!” and stay as long as his colleague served up interesting mathematical challenges.

With amphetamines to keep him going, Erdős did mathematics with a missionary zeal, often 20 hours a day, turning out some 1,500 papers, an order of magnitude higher than his most prolific colleagues produced. His enthusiasm was infectious. He turned mathematics into a social activity, encouraging his most hermetic colleagues to work together. The collective goal, he said, was to reveal the pages in the S.F.’s Book. Erdős himself published papers with 507 coauthors. In the mathematics community those 507 people gained the coveted distinction of having an “Erdős number of 1,” meaning that they wrote a paper with Erdős himself. Someone who published a paper with one of Erdős’s coauthors was said to have an Erdős number of 2, and an Erdős number of 3 meant that someone wrote a paper with someone who wrote a paper with someone who worked with Erdős. Albert Einstein’s Erdős number, for instance, was 2. The highest known Erdős number is 15; this excludes nonmathematicians, who all have an Erdős number of infinity.

In 1949 Erdős had his most satisfying victory over the prime numbers when he and Atle Selberg gave The Book proof of the prime number theorem (which is a statement about the frequency of primes at larger and larger numbers). In 1951 John von Neumann presented the Cole Prize to Erdős for his work in prime number theory. In 1959 Erdős attended the first International Conference on Graph Theory, a field he helped found. During the next three decades he continued to do important work in combinatorics, partition theory, set theory, number theory, and geometry—the diversity of the fields he worked in was unusual. In 1984 he won the most lucrative award in mathematics, the Wolf Prize, and used all but $720 of the $50,000 prize money to establish a scholarship in his parents’ memory in Israel. He was elected to many of the world’s most prestigious scientific societies, including the Hungarian Academy of Science (1956), the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (1979), and the British Royal Society (1989). Defying the conventional wisdom that mathematics was a young man’s game, Erdős went on proving and conjecturing until the age of 83, succumbing to a heart attack only hours after disposing of a nettlesome problem in geometry at a conference in Warsaw.