Mathematician:Paul Erdős

Mathematician
Hungarian mathematician known for the vast quantity of work he did (approximately 1500 papers).

Spent his entire life travelling the world looking for interesting mathematical problems to solve.

Perhaps most famous for his widespread collaborations (about 500 collaborators), from which the concept of the Erdős Number emerged. Found an elementary proof of the Prime Number Theorem at the same time as. Exactly what happened in 1948 has been discussed a great deal in the years following. See Erdős-Selberg dispute for a fairly unbiased account.

Because of his widespread influence, there are many stories in circulation about Erdős, not all of which are completely true, so don't believe everything you read about him (even this!) -- its source may be flawed.

Nationality
Hungarian

History

 * Born: 26 March 1913, Budapest, Hungary
 * Died: September 20, 1996, Warsaw, Poland

Theorems and Inventions

 * Erdős Number
 * Erdős Conjecture on Arithmetic Progressions (still unsolved)
 * Cameron-Erdős Conjecture (with )
 * Erdős-Anning Theorem (with )
 * Erdős-Ko-Rado Theorem (with and )
 * Erdős-Menger Conjecture (with )
 * Erdős-Rado Theorem (with )
 * Erdős-Straus Conjecture (with )

Publications
About 1500 papers, including:










 * 1949: On a new method in elementary number theory which leads to an elementary proof of the prime number theorem




 * 1953: On linear independence of sequences in a Banach space (with )


 * 1960: On the maximal number of pairwise orthogonal Latin squares of a given order (with and  )


 * 1968: A theorem of finite sets (in Theory of Graphs, co-edited with )

Notable Quotes

 * If you subtract $250$ from $100$, you get $150$ below zero.
 * -- at the age of $4$ to his mother


 * A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.

Also known as
In Hungarian, Paul Erdős is Erdős Pál.

His surname can often be seen without its diacritic: Erdos.