Paul Erdős

[puzzling]

I just realized that one of the greatest mathematicians ever was asexual. Paul Erdős the man who loved only numbers. He was born in Hungary in 1913 and died in 1996. He was the second most prolific mathematician in the history of science, second only to Leonard Euler. He was famous for his eccentric vocabulary. Like he said that people who had married were "captured" and people who had divorced were "liberated".

I just wanted to inform you if you didn't know who he was.

More information on this great man: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erdős

P.s. I'm sorry if there have been hundred threads about him.

[. . .but there are sounds]

I love Erdos. His work is amazing. For those who have mathematical minds, (and a fair understanding of discrete mathematics), it is incredibly entertaining to read his articles. He was absolutely brilliant and tended to approach problems from very strange angles. As an example, he wrote a very interesting article on graph colour theory entirely from the perspective of set theory.

[jmerry]

Since he was so prolific and had so many collaborators, mathematicians make a game of the Erdos number.

My own Erdos number is 2, which makes me one of over 8000 such people. The paper which linked me in featured both graph theory and metric spaces, which is nice.

OK, I mostly just wanted to brag about that.

[puzzling]

Since he was so prolific and had so many collaborators, mathematicians make a game of the Erdos number.

My own Erdos number is 2, which makes me one of over 8000 such people. The paper which linked me in featured both graph theory and metric spaces, which is nice.

OK, I mostly just wanted to brag about that.

No way! you have the Erdos number 2, thats awesome. I hope I will one day have one, but I'm planing on becoming a physicist so that most likely won't happen.

[KAGU143]

This topic doesn't really belong in Open Mic so I am going to move it.

*ponders*

I think that Musings and Rantings might be a good place for it to grow.

*reaches for the modly tweezers*

-GB

[jmerry]

... but I'm planing on becoming a physicist so that most likely won't happen.

It probably won't be that low, but a finite Erdos number is likely and would be pretty much anywhere in the sciences. There have been plenty of collaborations between mathematicians and physicists, so most Nobel winners are known to be finite.

[Olivier]

Since he was so prolific and had so many collaborators, mathematicians make a game of the Erdos number.

My own Erdos number is 2, which makes me one of over 8000 such people. The paper which linked me in featured both graph theory and metric spaces, which is nice.

OK, I mostly just wanted to brag about that.

As you should. My own Erdos number is 5 +/- 1 (it's all too long ago to remember exactly). [Edit: I looked up your link, and if you're a bit lenient about what constitutes co-authorship, then it's 3 - my honours supervisor (Erdos number = 2) reused some of my thesis in a publication I wasn't credited as an author of (and fair enough, because for the main proof he lifted, he needed to fix it first :))]

Today I've been going through the wreckage of our shed after the fire, and I came across some galley proofs of my university's mathematics magazine which I edited. It wasn't too long before I came across a singed page with an intact quote from Paul Erdos, and I thought of this thread:

G-d keeps a book of all the elegant proofs to theorems. Whenever a proof is particularly beautiful, we say "It is in the book".

You may not believe in G-d, but you have to believe in the book.