He will be famous or rather infamous ( who got screwed in the paper by that question ) by the people who gave CAT ( a fucked up paper to some how test your management skills ..i never got the connection ) this year ( 2006). There was one question regarding Erdos numbers ( yeah i am talking about the same guy ) in DI section ( if u dont know what it means dont bother). Anyway he is considered the second most prolific mathematician only after the great Euler. I can bet not many people would have heard of him but he is something you should know about, maybe we can draw some inspiration from him to change our lives ( i doubt it though).
Paul Erdos was a Hungarian born mathematician famous for his brilliantly elegant proofs of seemingly unsolvable mathematical problems, especially in the area of numbers theory.
He founded the field of discrete mathematics, the foundation of computer science.
So thoroughly did Erdos devote himself to mathematics that he never married, acquired no property beyond a change of clothes ("Property is a nuisance."), and he refused to stay tied down to a job because it would limit his ability to focus on mathematical problems and to collaborate with distant colleagues. Instead he traveled from one place to another, living out of a half-empty suitcase, staying with fellow mathematicians and sharing ideas from one place to the next. Whatever money he acquired was soon given away, sometimes to charities but often as prizes to those who solved the difficult mathematical problems he set them.
After his siblings died before his birth at the ages of 3 and 5, he was the only child of Anna and Lajos Erdos. His parents were both Jewish mathematicians, from a vibrant intellectual community. He could add at age 3 and at age 4 he could calculate for friends of the family how many seconds they had lived. Erdos showed early promise as a prodigy, and soon became regarded as a mathematical genius by his peers.
Though kind hearted, warm, and likeable Erdos was known for his lack of social graces, the by-product of an unusually sheltered childhood. He was extremely coddled by his mother who had to raise him on her own for several years while his father (captured by the invading Russian army in WWI), was imprisoned in Siberia. It is said Erdos had never tied his own shoelaces until age 14 nor buttered his own bread until he was 21 years old. More significantly, he had been kept home from school (which his mother thought crawling with diseases) all through childhood and early adolescence. Well you dont have to be inspired with this.
As his colleague said, "a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems", and Erdos drank copious quantities. He also took amphetamines, despite the concern of his friends, one of whom bet him $500 that he could not stop taking the drug for a month. Erdos won the bet, but complained that mathematics had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas. Now all I see is a blank piece of paper." The bet won, he promptly resumed his amphetamine habit.
He had his own idiosyncratic vocabulary: he spoke of "The Book," an imaginary book in which God had written down the best and most elegant proofs for mathematical theorems."You don't have to believe in God, but you should believe in The Book." He himself doubted the existence of God, whom he called the "Supreme Fascist".
Other idiosyncratic elements of Erdos' vocabulary include:
children were referred to as "epsilons"
women were "bosses"
men were "slaves"
people who stopped doing math had "died"
people who died had "left"
alcoholic drinks were "poison"
music was "noise"
to give a mathematical lecture was "to preach."
He died "in action" of a heart attack. a book entitled "Proofs From The Book" has been published, intended as a collection of the most beautiful mathematical proofs in the spirit of Erdos.
What is your Erdos Number ? :
Because of his prolific output, friends created the Erdos number as a humorous tribute;
Erdos alone was assigned the Erdos number of 0 (for being himself),
while his immediate collaborators could claim an Erdos number of 1,
their collaborators have Erdos number at most 2, and so on.
Erdos numbers have also been humorously assigned to an infant, a horse and several actors.
Well this was pretty long but he deserved this. I have taken much of it from wiki, I admit but its worth reading it. Thanks for the patience and you werent then its your problem i guess.....
