Paul Erdos (1913 – 1996)
Immensely prolific and famously eccentric mathematician who, with hundreds of collaborators, worked on problems in combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory and probability theory.
A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.
He was the Bob Hope of mathematics, a kind of vaudeville performer who told the same jokes and the same stories a thousand times. ... When he was scheduled to give yet another talk, no matter how tired he was, as soon as he was introduced to an audience, the adrenaline (or maybe amphetamine) would release into his system and he would bound onto the stage, full of energy, and do his routine for the 1001st time.
He was an absolutely wonderful man. He was interested in everything. You felt right away that you are not dealing with one of your colleagues or an average guy. He was a genius, his thoughts were all over the place. I've met very smart people. I have never met a genius before. ... He basically disregarded any disciplined approach to anything.
SF means Supreme Fascist — this would show that God is bad. I don't claim that this is correct, or that God exists, but it is just sort of half a joke. … As a joke I said, "What is the purpose of Life?" "Proof and conjecture, and keep the SF's score low."
Now, the game with the SF is defined as follows:
If you do something bad the SF gets at least two points.
If you don't do something good which you could have done, the SF gets at least one point.
And if nothing — if you are okay, then no one gets any point.
And the aim is to keep the SF's score low.
Nothing bothered Erdős more than political strictures which did not allow for complete freedom of expression and the ability to travel freely. ... Always traveling with a single shabby suitcase which doubled as a briefcase, he had little need or interest in the material world.
Some French socialist said that private property was theft … I say that private property is a nuisance.
One of my greatest regrets is that I didn't know him when he was a million times faster than most people. When I knew him he was only hundreds of times faster.
Twenty hours of work a day was not unusual. Upon arriving at a meeting, he would announce, in his thick Hungarian accent, "my brain is open." At parties, he would often stand alone oblivious to all else, deep in thought pondering some difficult argument.
Another roof, another proof.
In the early 1960s, when I was a student at University College London … Erdős came to visit us for a year. After collecting his first month's salary he was accosted by a beggar on Euston station, asking for the price of a cup of tea. Erdős removed a small amount from the pay packet to cover his own frugal needs and gave the remainder to the beggar.
In the late 1980s Erdős heard of a promising high school student named Glen Whitney who wanted to study mathematics at Harvard but was a little short the tuition. Erdős arranged to see him and, convinced of the young man's talent, lent him $1,000. He asked Whitney to pay him back only when it would not cause financial strain. A decade later Graham heard from Whitney, who at last had the money to repay Erdős. "Did Erdős expect me to pay interest?" Whitney wondered. "What should I do?" he asked Graham. Graham talked to Erdős. "Tell him," Erdős said, "to do with the $1,000 what I did."
His language had a special vocabulary — not just "the SF" [God] and "epsilon" [child] but also "bosses" (women), "slaves" (men), "captured" (married), "liberated" (divorced), "recaptured" (remarried), "noise" (music), "poison" (alcohol), "preaching" (giving a mathematics lecture), "Sam" (the United States), and "Joe" (the Soviet Union). When he said someone had "died," Erdős meant that the person had stopped doing mathematics. When he said someone had "left," the person had died.