Paul Erdős, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death
TweetPaul Erdős
Hungarian mathematician and freelancer
Date of Birth: 
Place of Birth: Budapest, Hungary
About Paul Erdős
- Paul Erdos (Hungarian: Erdos Pál ['?rdø?? 'pa?l]; 26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was a renowned Hungarian mathematician.
- He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures 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 at a conference in Warsaw. Erdos 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 studies 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. Erdos 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.
- Erdos's prolific output with co-authors prompted the creation of the Erdos number, the number of steps in the shortest path between a mathematician and Erdos in terms of co-authorships.
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