Paul Erdos

Today I will like to introduce a very colorful character of mathematics to you all, who goes by the name of Paul Erdos.  Some people might have heard about him due to the prevalence of Erdos number, but I think even very few of them know about his personal life, which is a treat to know about.



Paul Erdos was a hungarian mathematician, who got his doctorate at the age of 21. He published the most number of papers in the mathematical history, even more than the legendary Euler. Though its interesting to know that Euler produced more number of pages than Erdos. This person, Erdos, never had a home of his own, and no possession. He had a briefcase, which contained a few clothes. That's all he had. He used to go to his friends or collaborator's home, and announce that "My brain is open". He used to collaborate with those people, publish a few papers, and then move on to the next collaborator. This was his lifestyle throughout. He is  known to collaborate with 511 people. Humorously, his living style is compared with a linked list. In fact, he died while attending a conference itself. Due to his collaborative style, the concept of "Erdos number" of any research has become popular."

He had a dictionary of his own. He used to say that its not necessary to believe in God, but one should have believe in "The book". The book contains all the elegant proofs of theorems and exotic mathematics. Whenever he used to see any beautiful proof, he used to say, "this one is directly from the book."

He used to refer children as epsilon, as it is used to refer arbitrarily small quantities in mathematics.
Other terms of his dictionary are introduced below.

I got the idea of writing this blog, as I have met with one of the Indian collaborators of Erdos. His name is K Ramchandran, and he worked in number theory, with over 200 publications. I met him in 2007, at NIAS, Bangalore. He was an exceptionally humble fellow. He died recently, in January 2011. So they all must be now collaborating with Ramanujam.