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Paul Erdős

Paul Erdős
Erdos head budapest fall 1992.jpg
Paul Erdős at a student seminar in Budapest (Fall 1992)
Born (1913-03-26)26 March 1913
Budapest, Austria-Hungary
Died 20 September 1996(1996-09-20) (aged 83)
Warsaw, Poland
Residence Hungary
United Kingdom
Israel
United States
Nationality Hungarian
Fields Mathematics
Institutions Manchester
Princeton
Purdue
Notre Dame
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Technion – Israel Institute of Technology
Alma mater Eötvös Loránd University
Doctoral advisor Lipót Fejér
Doctoral students Bonifac Donat
Joseph Kruskal
George B. Purdy
Alexander Soifer
Béla Bollobás
Known for See list
Notable awards Wolf Prize (1983/84)
AMS Cole Prize (1951)

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 solving 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. Erdős's prolific output with co-authors prompted the creation of the Erdős number, the shortest path between a mathematician and Erdős in terms of co-authorships.

Paul Erdős was born in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, on 26 March 1913. He was the only surviving child of Anna and Lajos Erdős (formerly Engländer). His two sisters, aged 3 and 5, both died of scarlet fever a few days before he was born. His parents were both Jewish mathematics teachers from a vibrant intellectual community. His fascination with mathematics developed early—by the age of four, given a person’s age, he could calculate, in his head, how many seconds they had lived.


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