Erdös, Paul

Paul Erdös (born Pál Erdõs): born March 26, 1913 (Budapest, Hungary), died September 20, 1996 (Warsaw, Poland). Erdös is arguably one of the greatest and most prolific mathematicians ever known. He is directly responsible for the creation of several fields of mathematical investigation (particularly in discreet mathematics), and contributed heavily to many others. Erdös defied the conventional wisdom that mathematics was just a young man's game. For the last 25 years of his life, Erdös raced against the specter of old age to prove as many mathematical theorems as possible. Fortified by espresso and amphetamines, he did mathematics 19 hours a day, seven days a week. "A mathematician," he was fond of saying, "is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." For much of his life, Erdõs did not have a "permanent" home or academic position; instead, he travelled from city to city and country to country, staying with other mathematicians and attending as many conferences as possible to encounter as many unsolved problems and meet as many possible collaborators as possible.