Pál Erdős

Paul Erdős
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 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. 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—he was often left home by himself because his father had been imprisoned in a Siberian gulag, causing his mother to have to work long hours to support their household. Left to his own devices, he taught himself to read through mathematics texts that his parents left around their home. By the age of four, given a person’s age, he could calculate, in his head, how many seconds they had lived. Due to his sisters' deaths, he had an unusually close relationship with his mother, with the two of them allegedly sharing the same bed till he left for college.