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Paul Erdös
(26 Mar 1913 - 20 Sep 1996)
Hungarian mathematician.
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Science Quotes by Paul Erdös (6 quotes)
[On why are numbers beautiful?] It’s like asking why is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony beautiful. If you don’t see why, someone can’t tell you. I know numbers are beautiful. If they aren’t beautiful, nothing is.
— Paul Erdös
As quoted in Paul Hoffman, The Man who Loves Only Numbers (1998), 44.
Another roof, another proof.
[His motto, as an itinerant between mathematical friends’ houses at which he collaborated.]
[His motto, as an itinerant between mathematical friends’ houses at which he collaborated.]
— Paul Erdös
Quoted by Béla Bollobás, 'The Life and Work of Paul Erdos', in Shiing-Shen Chern and Friedrich Hirzebruch, Wolf Prize in Mathematics (2000), 293.
Every human activity, good or bad, except mathematics, must come to an end.
— Paul Erdös
Quoted as a favorite saying of Paul Erdös, by Béla Bollobás, 'The Life and Work of Paul Erdos', in Shiing-Shen Chern and Friedrich Hirzebruch (eds.) Wolf Prize in Mathematics (2000), Vol. 1, 292.
Finally I am becoming stupider no more.
— Paul Erdös
The epitaph Paul Erdos wrote for himself. From the original Hungarian: Végre nem butulok tovább. As translated for Epigraph, Chapter 0, 'The Two-and-a-Half-Billion-Years-Old Man', in Paul Hoffman, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers (1998), 3. Google Translate gives: “Finally, I’m not stupid anymore,” or “Finally I won’t be stupid anymore.
Here I am: My brain is open.
[As an itinerant scholar, this was greeting he often gave, ready to collaborate, upon arrival at the home of any mathematician colleague.]
[As an itinerant scholar, this was greeting he often gave, ready to collaborate, upon arrival at the home of any mathematician colleague.]
— Paul Erdös
Quoted by Béla Bollobás, 'The Life and Work of Paul Erdos", in Shiing-Shen Chern and Friedrich Hirzebruch, Wolf Prize in Mathematics (2000), 293.
Mathematics is not yet ready for such problems.
— Paul Erdös
Given, without citation, as the comment by Paul Erdös on the intractability of the 3x + 1 problem, by Jeffrey C. Lagarias in 'The 3x + 1 Problem and Its Generalizations', The American Mathematical Monthly, (Jan 1985), 92, No. 1, 3. Collected in Jeffrey C. Lagarias, The Ultimate Challenge: The 3x+1 Problem (2010), 31.
Quotes by others about Paul Erdös (2)
It is hard to exaggerate Mr Erdos’s passion. For 19 hours a day, seven days a week, stimulated by coffee, and later by amphetamines, he worked on mathematics. He might start a game of chess, but would probably doze off until the conversation returned to maths. To find another life this century as intensely devoted to abstraction, one must reach back to Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), who stripped his life bare for philosophy. But whereas Wittgenstein discarded his family fortune as a form of self-torture, Mr Erdos gave away most of the money he earned because he simply did not need it. “Private property is a nuisance,” he would say. And where Wittgenstein was driven by near suicidal compulsions, Mr Erdos simply constructed his life to extract from his magnificent obsession the maximum amount of happiness.
— Magazine
In obituary 'Paul Erdos', The Economist (5 Oct 1996), 83.
A colleague likened Mr Erdos to a honeybee: an industrious creature who buzzed about the world and pollinated the fields of mathematics.
— Magazine
The Economist, October 5th 1996, page 83.
See also:
- 26 Mar - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Erdös's birth.
- The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos, by Paul Hoffman. - book suggestion.
- Booklist for Paul Erdos.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
