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“honestly…you’re weird…”
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(hungarian mathematician)
(the most prolific mathematician of the 20th century)
(1913 – 1996)
(died of a heart attack at age 83)
(one of the greatest + most prolific mathematicians of all time)
(one of my spiritual heroes)
(by 21, he was awarded a ‘doctorate’ in ‘mathematics’)
(then moved from ‘hungary’ to ‘england’ in 1934 because of increasing ‘anti-semitism’)
(he had his own idiosyncratic vocabulary: he spoke of “The Book”, an imaginary book in which God had written down the best and most elegant proofs for mathematical theorems)
(lecturing in 1985 he said, “You don’t have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book”)
(he himself doubted the existence of god, whom he called the “Supreme Fascist” (SF))
(he accused the SF of hiding his socks and Hungarian passports, and of keeping the most elegant mathematical proofs to himself)
(when he saw a particularly beautiful mathematical proof he would exclaim, “This one’s from The Book!”)
(this later inspired a book entitled “Proofs from THE BOOK”)
(children were referred to as “epsilons” (because in mathematics, particularly calculus, an arbitrarily small positive quantity is commonly denoted by that Greek letter (ε))
(women were “bosses”)
(men were “slaves”)
(people who stopped doing math had “died”)
(people who physically died had “left”)
(alcoholic drinks were “poison”)
(music was “noise”)
(people who had married were “captured”)
(people who had divorced were “liberated”)
(to give a mathematical lecture was “to preach”)
(to give an oral exam to a student was “to torture” him/her)
(also, all countries which he thought failed to provide freedom to individuals as long as they did no harm to anyone else were classified as ‘imperialist’ and given a name that began with a lowercase letter)
(for example, the ‘U.S.’ was “samland” (after ‘Uncle Sam’), the ‘Soviet Union’ was “joedom” (after ‘Joseph Stalin’), and ‘Israel’ was “israel”)
(for his epitaph he suggested, “i’ve finally stopped getting dumber”)
(hungarian: “végre nem butulok tovább”)
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(“Paul Erdős” (Hungarian: Erdős Pál [ˈɛrdøːʃ ˈpaːl]; 26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was a hungarian mathematician)
(he was one of the most prolific mathematicians 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 in 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)
(he championed and contributed to ‘ramsey theory’, which studied the conditions in which order necessarily appears)
(overall, his work leaned towards solving previously open problems, rather than developing or exploring new areas of mathematics)
(‘erdős’ published around 1,500 mathematical papers during his lifetime, a figure that remains unsurpassed)
(he firmly believed mathematics to be a social activity, living an itinerant lifestyle with the sole purpose of writing mathematical papers with other mathematicians)
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(erdős’s prolific output with ‘co-authors’ prompted the creation of the “erdős number”, the number of steps in the shortest path between a mathematician + erdős in terms of ‘co-authorships’)
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*👨🔬🕵️♀️🙇♀️*SKETCHES*🙇♂️👩🔬🕵️♂️*
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👈👈👈☜*“HISTORICAL NUMBER CRUNCHERS”* ☞ 👉👉👉
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💕💝💖💓🖤💙🖤💙🖤💙🖤❤️💚💛🧡❣️💞💔💘❣️🧡💛💚❤️🖤💜🖤💙🖤💙🖤💗💖💝💘
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*🌈✨ *TABLE OF CONTENTS* ✨🌷*
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🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥*we won the war* 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥