Paul Erdos Biography Quotes 8 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Paul Erdos (born Pal Erdos) entered the world in 1913 in Budapest, Hungary, into a Jewish family deeply engaged with mathematics. His parents, Lajos and Anna Erdos, were both mathematics teachers, and their home shaped his early fascination with numbers. Two older sisters had died of illness before his birth, a family tragedy that shadowed his childhood. During World War I, his father was taken prisoner in Russia, leaving Anna to raise Paul, encourage his precocious talents, and shelter him from turmoil. By adolescence he was astonishing teachers with mental calculations and original insights. He studied in Budapest, earning a doctorate in his early twenties, and quickly began publishing papers that signaled the breadth that would define his career.

Becoming a Global Mathematician
As anti-Jewish restrictions intensified in Central Europe, Erdos left Hungary to work in the United Kingdom and, soon after, in the United States. The moves began a lifelong pattern: he preferred short-term posts and visiting positions, never settling into a single permanent job. He spent time at prestigious centers, including the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, but his real home became the international network of collaborators who welcomed him into offices, spare bedrooms, and common rooms. He often traveled with a small suitcase, a few notebooks, and a prodigious supply of problems. Cold War politics occasionally complicated his visas and itineraries, but they did not slow his productivity or his appetite for new partners and new ideas.

Collaborations and Community
Erdos transformed collaboration into an art. He wrote more than 1, 500 papers with over 500 coauthors, a feat that made the playful notion of an "Erdos number" a cultural touchstone in mathematics. Close companions included Pal Turan, with whom he sustained a lifelong mathematical friendship forged in prewar Budapest and deepened after the war; Alfred Renyi, with whom he pioneered the modern theory of random graphs; George Szekeres and Esther Klein, whose early problem sessions influenced his thinking about combinatorial geometry; and Richard Rado, with whom he helped shape Ramsey theory. In North America he sustained especially fruitful collaborations with Ronald Graham, Joel Spencer, and Fan Chung, among many others; he also worked with Bela Bollobas, Endre Szemeredi, Laszlo Lovasz, Vera Sos, Andras Hajnal, and Mark Kac. These names mark only a fraction of the community he energized, mentored, and knit together.

Fields and Results
Erdos's mathematics spanned number theory, combinatorics, graph theory, set theory, probability, and analysis. He combined elementary methods with profound insight, often seeking proofs that depended on clear ideas and sharp estimates rather than heavy machinery. With Alfred Renyi he introduced the Erdos, Renyi model of random graphs, a foundation of modern network theory. With Mark Kac he proved the Erdos, Kac theorem, revealing a normal distribution governing the number of prime factors of a typical integer. In extremal and probabilistic combinatorics he devised techniques that reshaped the subject, and with Joel Spencer he helped establish the probabilistic method as a standard tool; their collaboration informed a seminal text that trained generations of researchers.

He contributed central results and conjectures in additive and combinatorial number theory, discrete geometry, and Ramsey theory. The Erdos, Szekeres theorem about convex polygons emerged from early Budapest problem sessions and influenced combinatorial geometry for decades. The Erdos, Ginzburg, Ziv theorem became a cornerstone of additive combinatorics. Along with Richard Rado and Andras Hajnal he advanced partition calculus and Ramsey-type phenomena, setting the agenda for later breakthroughs by colleagues such as Endre Szemeredi and Laszlo Lovasz. He posed legions of problems: the distinct distances problem in the plane, the discrepancy problem in combinatorics, questions about sum-product growth, covering systems, and the structure of graphs avoiding certain subconfigurations. Many of these problems led to flourishing research programs, and some remain open.

Style, Language, and Problem Culture
Erdos cultivated a distinctive voice and a playful philosophical outlook. He spoke of "The Book", an imaginary volume in which the most elegant proofs were kept, and he chased those proofs relentlessly; the idea inspired many mathematicians and was later celebrated in a popular anthology. He called children "epsilons" and mischievously referred to God as the "Supreme Fascist", a private joke about the universe's stingy distribution of mathematical insight. He announced "My brain is open" when arriving at a colleague's door, ready to work at any hour. He popularized the practice of offering cash prizes for solutions to problems he proposed, ranging from modest sums to more substantial rewards. The prizes were less about money than about signaling the importance and difficulty of the questions, and they helped animate an international problem culture.

Recognition and Influence
Although he avoided academic permanence, Erdos collected honors from many corners of the mathematical world. He received major prizes such as the Cole Prize and the Wolf Prize, and he was awarded numerous honorary doctorates. Yet his deepest legacy lies in the collaborative spirit he embodied and the subjects he energized. Combinatorics, graph theory, and discrete probability matured in part because his questions drew in talent and his methods revealed new vistas. Colleagues like Ronald Graham and Fan Chung helped preserve and extend this legacy; younger leaders such as Endre Szemeredi, Laszlo Lovasz, Vera Sos, and Bela Bollobas developed lines of inquiry that Erdos's problems and ideas made possible. The Erdos number, maintained informally by his friends and later systematically by enthusiasts, testifies to the reach of his coauthorship network and to the social fabric of mathematical discovery that he did so much to weave.

Later Years and Passing
Erdos never stopped traveling, problem-posing, or coauthoring. He moved in seasonal circuits through Europe, North America, and Israel, drawing energy from conversation and shared work at blackboards and kitchen tables alike. He lived frugally, uninterested in possessions and uninterested in institutional power, but he invested lavishly in the time and attention he gave to others' mathematics. He died in 1996 in Warsaw, while attending a meeting and doing what he loved: discussing problems among friends. His notebooks, problems lists, and the memories of collaborators such as Pal Turan, Ronald Graham, Fan Chung, Joel Spencer, and many others continue to shape the field. Across disciplines, from number theory to computer science, the influence of his methods and conjectures endures, and the collaborative ethos he championed remains one of his most profound bequests.

Our collection contains 8 quotes who is written by Paul, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Learning - Overcoming Obstacles - Aging.