MYSTERIES OF THE EQUILATERAL TRIANGLE - HIKARI Ltd

Biographical Vignettes 177
in popularizing the mathematical work of the institutionalized artist George
Odom has already been described in Chapter 1 and Property 74. He was a
Fellow of the Royal Societies of London and Canada as well as a Companion
of the Order of Canada, their highest honor. He died in Toronto, aged 96, and
attributed his longevity to strict vegetarianism as well as an exercise regimen
which included 50 daily push-ups.
Vignette 38 (Paul Erdös: 1913-1996).
Paul Erdös was born in Budapest, Hungary to Jewish parents both of
whom were Mathematics teachers [175, 269]. His fascination with Mathematics
developed early as is evidenced by his ability, at age three, to calculate
how many seconds a person had lived. In 1934, at age 21, he was awarded a
doctorate in Mathematics from Eötvös Loránd University for the thesis Über
die Primzahlen gewisser arithmetischer Reihen written under the supervision
of L. Fejér. Due to a rising tide of anti-Semitism, he immediately accepted
the position of Guest Lecturer in Mathematics at Manchester University in
England and, in 1938, he accepted a Fellowship at Princeton University. He
then held a number of part-time and temporary positions which eventually led
to an itinerant existence. To describe Erdös as peripatetic would be to risk
the mother of all understatements. He spent most of his adult life living out
of a single suitcase (sometimes traveling with his mother), had no checking
account and rarely stayed consecutively in one place for more than a month.
Friends and collaborators such as Ron Graham (see below) helped him with
the mundane details of modern life. He was so eccentric that even his close
friend, Stan Ulam, described him thusly: “His peculiarities are so numerous
that it is impossible to describe them all.” He had his own idiosyncratic vocabulary
including The Book which referred to an imaginary book in which
God (whom he called the “Supreme Fascist”) had written down the most elegant
proofs of mathematical theorems. He foreswore any sexual relations and
regularly abused amphetamines. Mathematically, he was a problem solver and
not a theory builder, frequently offering cash prizes for solutions to his favorite
problems. He worked primarily on problems in combinatorics, graph theory,
number theory, classical analysis, approximation theory, set theory and probability
theory. His most famous result is the discovery, along with Atle Selberg,
of an elementary proof of the Prime Number Theorem. See Properties 48 and
55 and Recreation 13 for a further discussion of his contributions. He published
more papers (approximately 1475) than any other Mathematician in history
with 511 coauthors. (Euler published more pages.) This prolific output led to
the concept of the Erdös number which measures the collaborative distance
between him and other Mathematicians. He was the recipient of the Cole
and Wolf Prizes and was an Honorary Member of the London Mathematical
Society. He died, aged 86, while attending, naturally enough, a Mathematics
conference in Warsaw, Poland.