Hungarian mathematician (1913–1996)
Paul Erdős [also Erdős Pál, Pál Erdős, Erdos or Erdös] (26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was an 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.
From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Native Name:
Erdős Pál
Alternative Names:
Paul Erdos
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Erdős
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Erdos
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Pál Erdős
From Wikidata (CC0)
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I think that, as , a very clever young Israeli mathematician, once said, "I am an opportunist. I do what I can do." If there is anything in number theory that I can do, I certainly do it. But you see some of the problems in number theory are enormously difficult and many of these classic problems are very, very hard to make any progress in.
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.