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Wikipedia: Paul ErdosWikipedia: Paul ErdosPaul Erdös (pronounced "Erd-ish") was born in Budapest, Hungary into a non-practising Jewish family. Erdös was an only child, having lost his only siblings (two sisters aged three and five) to scarlet fever just days before he was born. His parents were themselves both teachers of mathematics, and Erdös began to demonstrate his exceptional talents at an early age; at the age of four he independently observed several established properties of the prime numbers.
In 1914, Erdös's father Lajos was captured by the Russian army in its attack on the Austro-Hungarian alliance, and he spent six years in captivity in Siberia. Erdös's mother Anna, excessively protective after the loss of her two daughters, kept Paul away from school for much of his early years and a tutor was provided to teach him at home. In 1920 Lajos Erdös returned from captivity and continued the education of his son in mathematics and English.
Despite the restrictions on Jews entering universities in Hungary, Erdös was allowed to enter in 1930, having won a national examination. He was awarded his doctorate in 1934. Probably as a result of being anxious at the increasing anti-Jewish sentiment in Hungary during the 1930s, he took up a post-doctoral fellowship at Manchester. In 1938 he took his first American position at Princeton, although his tenure was not renewed as the administration of Princeton deemed him "uncouth and unconventional". Around this time Erdös began the habit travelling from campus to campus which was to define his professional career.
All accounts report Erdös to have been a naďve, almost childlike character. An awkward incident occurred in 1941 when Erdös and another mathematician became involved in a heated discussion about a point of mathematical theory, and failed to notice they were too near a military communication facility on Long Island. They were arrested for trespassing and on suspicion of spying, and Erdös unfortunately earned an FBI record.
The contributions which Erdös made to mathematics were numerous and broad. However, basically Erdös was a solver of problems, not a builder of theories. The problems which attracted him most were problems in combinatorics, graph theory, and number theory. He did not just want to solve problems, however, he wanted to solve them in an elegant and elementary way. To Erdös the proof had to provide insight into why the result was true, not just provide a complicated sequence of steps which would constitute a formal proof yet somehow fail to provide any understanding.
Professionally, Erdös is best known as a solver of problems, particularly those regarded as exceptionally challenging. His characteristic style was to solve complicated problems in an elegant and visionary manner. Erdös received the Cole Prize of the American Mathematical Society in 1951 for his many papers on the theory of numbers, and in particular for the paper "On a new method in elementary number theory which leads to an elementary proof of the prime number theorem", published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 1949.
In the early 1950's Erdös's FBI record brought him to the attention of the McCarthy Investigations, and Erdös suddenly found he could not obtain a visa to the United States. Consequently, he spent much of the next ten years in Israel. During the early 1960s he made numerous requests to be allowed to return to the United States and a visa was finally granted in November 1963.
For the next thirty years Erdös "officially" held posts at a number of universities in Israel, the US and Great Britain, but in reality he was a permanent nomad of no fixed agenda or location, wandering to all major universities as he saw fit. His working habits became characterised by working obsessively long hours, sleeping at most 4-5 hours a night and relying on the heavy use of amphetamines to maintain his activity levels. Once a friend challenged him to give up his drug use for a month; he complied, but later complained bitterly that mathematics was held up for a month.
His prestige and genius usually meant he was wholly welcomed at the universities he arrived at, and he inevitably completed a paper with any mathematician who could present a topic that appealed to him. As a result he is possible the most collaborative mathematician ever, with nearly 1500 jointly published papers. The community of mathematicians who worked with him created the (tongue in cheek) Erdös number in his honour.
Erdös was a constant source of witty aphorisms: "Another roof, another proof", "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems", "You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book" (refering to The Book which supposedly contains the most succinct, elegant and illuminating proofs for all mathematical statements). Erdös used the word "to leave" for people who died, and the word "to die" for people who stopped doing mathematics.
Erdös went on to receive many awards including the Wolf Prize of 50 000 dollars in 1983. However as his lifestyle needed little money, he gave most of it away to help favoured students or as prizes for solving problems he had posed. He died in Warsaw on September 20 1996.