Paul Erdos - Studies in Creative Insanity #121

A mathematician who hated sleep, was addicted to coffee and methamphetamine, saw equations pre-written on blank paper, and referred to God as the “Supreme Fascist”—what’s not to love?

For most of his life Erdos had no regular income. When in 1984 he was awarded the $50,000 Wolf Prize (shared with differential geometer Shiing-Shen Chern), he promptly gave it away, keeping only $720 for himself.

Paul Erdos wasn’t big on sleep, and neither am I.  I went to bed at around six this morning with about 10 different projects going, and woke up at 1 this afternoon having lost momentum and focus on every single one of them.  If I could pull off a week or so of continuous consciousness, Brainsturbator would be a finished artifact.

So what’s the solution?  Polyphasic sleep is not something I’ve got the luxury of trying out right now, but coffee is a pretty good solution.  Erdos took it a few dozens steps further by making the leap to methamphetamines.  He lived out of a suitcase, avoided alcohol, and worked 19 hour days when he was taking it easy.

Paul Erdos is loved and honored by the BIPT because his methodology and philosophy were rather unique: in a field where names are made off grand theories, all he wanted to do was solve problems. Specific, tangible, concrete problems....just keep lining them up, Erdos could not get enough.  The man was truly a beast with the frontal lobes.  You can see contributions from Erdos writ large in nearly every single sub-discipline of mathematics: combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory and probability theory, for starters.

He was so prolific, and so dedicated to the lost art of “collaboration”, that mathematicans today make a quasi-serious study of what’s known as the Erdos Number --- basically, Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, only for dudes with graphing calculators.  Erdos was so ubiquitous in the mathematics establishment that the average college math major has an Erdos number of 8 degrees of separation from the man.  Over 60% of the current MIT faculty have an Erdos number lower than 4.

Erdos was a passionate man who insisted he did not lecture on mathematics, he preached.  He honored children (and called them Epsilons), distrusted God (the Supreme Fascist (SF)), and went out in style:

“He died with his boots on? remarked Ron Graham. Two days before his death he gave a splendid talk at the Banach Center. A day later he finished his last single-authored paper. With a ticket in his wallet he was ready to move on to the next conference: number theory in Lithuania.

For a more sanitized memorial, the American Math Society has the goods.  (It’s always sad when great humans get their complicated images washed in the acid bath of polite respect. Dead is dead, but nothing really kills people like a eulogy does.) And for a rather serious collection of working links (most of what google turns up is long-defunct pages on old university servers), look no further than this.