"Finally I'm becoming stupider no more"

A small, mischievous line from Paul Erdős compresses his eccentric humor, relentless work ethic, and wonderfully elastic English into a single punch. The phrasing is deliberately off-kilter, “stupider no more” bends grammar to make a brighter point. It sounds childlike and disarming, but its target is the very adult feeling of mental fog lifting, the sudden return of sharpness after a period of dullness.

Erdős lived for mathematics with an ascetic intensity, and he treated alertness as a moral and intellectual resource. Coffee, late nights, and, at times, stimulants were tools he openly used to keep his mind in high gear. The line rings like a celebratory sigh at the end of cognitive deprivation: the engine turns over again, the ideas start to hum, and the world of problems becomes tractable. By calling himself “stupider,” he avoids bragging; he frames genius not as a permanent state but as a fluctuating signal that can weaken and strengthen with circumstance.

Beneath the joke lies a philosophy of clarity. Erdős often spoke of “The Book,” the imagined place where God keeps the most beautiful proofs. When he felt slow, the Book receded; when his mind quickened, the pages seemed closer. The phrase captures that proximity returning. It also reveals compassion for his own limits. He doesn’t say he has become smart; he says he has stopped becoming stupid. The movement is away from fog, not toward self-congratulation.

There is a cultural critique tucked inside as well. Creative work depends on conditions, rest, rhythm, collaboration, even odd rituals, and dismissing those realities as weakness misunderstands how insight arrives. Erdős’s line blesses the fragile, contingent nature of brilliance while celebrating the joy of thinking clearly again. It is both an apology to lost time and a toast to the mind’s resilience, a wink and a vow to get back to work where it matters: on the next beautiful problem.