Paul Erdos

Paul Erdos was a Hungarian mathematician born on 26 March 1913 in Budapest, and he became one of the most prolific figures in the history of the subject. He produced more than 1,500 papers and worked with 514 collaborators, a record of output and partnership that few researchers have approached. In Hungarian his name is written surname first, as Erdős Pál. For most of his adult life he held no permanent home and owned almost no possessions, carrying his belongings in a half-empty suitcase as he moved from one university or colleague to the next. He treated mathematics as a social activity, arriving at a fellow researcher’s door and proposing problems until the work was done. That restless rhythm shaped both his personality and the enormous network of joint papers he left behind. Erdos was born into a Hungarian-Jewish family in which both parents taught high school mathematics, and his talent appeared very early. He took his doctorate in 1934 at Pázmány Péter University in Budapest, supervised by Lipót Fejér. He left Hungary that year for a fellowship in Manchester, because the anti-Jewish laws then in force closed academic posts there to him. The travelling never really stopped, and it…