Paul Erdős was a renowned Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. He was known both for his social practice of mathematics (he engaged more than 500 collaborators) and for his eccentric lifestyle (Time magazine called him The Oddball's Oddball). He devoted his waking hours to mathematics, even into his later years—indeed, his death came only hours after he solved a geometry problem at a conference in Warsaw.
Erdős pursued and proposed problems in discrete mathematics, graph theory, number theory, mathematical analysis, approximation theory, set theory, and probability theory. Much of his work centered around discrete mathematics, cracking many previously unsolved problems in the field. Overall, his work leaned towards solving previously open problems, rather than developing or exploring new areas of mathematics.
Paul Erdős has not been among us for more than twenty years. Vilmos Komornik, who had written various papers with Erdős, was asked by several friends to recall some of his memories: maybe they can shed light on his personality from a new perspective. This article was published in Nieuw Archief voor Wiskunde and is available online here.
A funny story from the article is the following,
In the afternoon he found Set Theory by Hajnal and Hamburger on my bookshelf and read it carefully. Suddenly he exclaimed, “Yeah, there’s a mistake!” I was incredulous: remembering András Hajnal’s precise and elegant university lectures, I couldn’t imagine that there might be a mistake in the book. But he persisted: “They write that Gödel proved in 1939 that the continuum hypothesis is consistent with the usual set theory axioms. But it was in 1938, not in 1939. I remember because I was sitting in a café with him in Vienna when he told me and it was in 1938.
A mathematician once told me that problems that are very simple to state can be very deceiving, and sometimes turn out to be extremely difficult to solve. One such problem was the Four Color Problem.
The scientific world would not be what it is today without normal distribution. It is the foundation of many statistical models for several good reasons. Most importantly, it appears commonly in nature. But this is only the tip of the iceberg.
During the last decades, many resources have been invested in quantum computing. This research field has grown immensely and amazing results have been obtained. The plans for the future are highly ambitious, but at the same time, there are serious questions that need to be addressed.
In this article Maya continues her journey from Rotterdam to Brussels. She starts thinking about a puzzle from her childhood, the three utilities problem. At the end of the jouney she has reached a very important theorem from graph theory!
Paul Erdős was a renowned Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. He was known both for his social practice of mathematics (he engaged more than 500 collaborators) and for his eccentric lifestyle (Time magazine called him The Oddball's Oddball). He devoted his waking hours to mathematics, even into his later years—indeed, his death came only hours after he solved a geometry problem at a conference in Warsaw.
